Coming soon to a net near you...
NoCeM for email
- Method 1
- Very easy to implement-- the code is called from
the user's .forward file. It uses filtering criteria to weed out spam
email, and to detect incoming notices to process. The downside is
that if the notice arrives after the spam you'll still see it. This
has been implemented on a limited basis by panix.com. (See below)
- Method 2
- Hard to implement-- the code scans the user's
inbox every time a notice is received, and it pulls out spam, even if
it has made it into the inbox. The downside is that this requires more
expertise to install and the user likely will need privs like cron
access.
- Method 3
- For PC's-- For Eudora pro, it would be easy to
have a VB application fetch the latest notices and enter appropriate
filters. What about for other email clients?
Panix.com, a New York City ISP has
started a local anti-email spam program. If enough users complain
about a given site, that site is added to global procmail and filter
files which users can use or ignore at their option. Scripts have
been written to automate the installation of procmail for less
technical users. See http://www.panix.com/e-spam.html
or send email to spam-sites@panix.com for more
info.
NoCeM-via-IP
The biggest obstacle to developing a PC NoCeM client is the need to
verify every notice with PGP. To get around that, I propose to
develop NoCeM servers that will read notices via email and news, and
check the signature before passing them along. (The PGP info will be
passed as well for optional checking as desired). Instead of
choosing issuers via their PGP key, the Issuer header line would be
used.
I envision the NoCeM server to be written in perl/CGI and the client
to speak a modifyed form of HTTP so as to minimize the amount of
overhead involved in starting up a server.
Obviously since there will be no other authentication required, people
will have to trust the servers they listen to. Also, if local
providers wish to make this availble to their users, they could
pre-hash the message-id -> filename info which would greatly increase
the speed for the clients.
This is also a win for those users who have long propagation delays
for the nocem group.
PC NoCeM client
I'm aware that a few of the PC newsreaders keep newsrc files in the
standard unix format. After NoCeM-via-IP is rolling, this should be
a relatively easy task.
Mac NoCeM client
This is entirely beyond the scope of anything I could accomplish now.
Any volunteers?
RFC-ification of the NoCeM spec
It's been over a year, and people are starting to develop other
clients for the NoCeM protocol. To help this development, I would
like to formalize the spec in RFC format.
NoCeM mailing list
While I've wanted to keep all discussion "out in the open" on usenet,
I think the enhanced efficiency of a mailing list would be very
helpful. Thanks to Howard Goldstein, this has been started -- send a
message to nocem-l-request@mail.mpcs.com
with "subscribe" in the body of your message.
Division of labor
This will be the most important future issue for NoCeM. I do not have
the time to maintain the current client, much less solely develop
anything listed above. I am more than happy to help coordinate
efforts, and steer things in what I think is the right direction, but
I'm going to need a bunch of volunteers to help.
Any help will be welcome, from hacking code to writing docs to
writing a chonology of the moose and spam cancelling. Writing to the
big newsreader/mail-client authors to let them know about NoCeM would
be a most worthwhile task.
Please send email: moose@cm.org to
volunteer or to let me know what you are doing.