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.