inspired by Rands

Let's take the spam problem on by being aggressive about it.
People are dumb. If they see spam, some small percentage is going to buy from it. Therefore they shouldn't see it.

Every mail program knows how to filter. None of them (except, kinda sorta MH) is built around the idea that filtering and sorting is the most important thing. That's what we need.

I call the interface Buckets. It could be built on top of Thunderbird or GMail pretty easily. Here's how it works: your home screen is a set of icons that include counters of new mail. The icons are Friends, Family, Work, Hobbies and Slops. The user cannot change these. At the beginning of a user's experience with Buckets, all mail comes into Slops. The Slops bucket must be sorted; first by hand, later automatically. You cannot reply to a message in Slops: you must assign it to one of the other buckets or consign it to the Burn Bin. The buckets remember salient features of what you put into them - Subject, From, List headers and so forth. It might be a good use for CRM-114. Whenever confidence is high that a new message fits into a non-Slops bucket, it is automatically assigned. Spam is recognized as automatically as possible, here, and flagged.

Advanced users can create subsidiary Buckets inside the big ones. Mail is assessed for suitability in a subBucket only after it has qualified to escape Slops.

Every message has a Change My Bucket control.

Buckets stop showing older messages, but you can search for them or star them to stay on top. Messages are never deleted except by an explicit Kick The Bucket.

Search can happen over all Buckets or just the one you're in.

Now the radical part: automatic whitelisting and blacklisting. Moving a message into a Friends/Family/Work/Hobbies Bucket automatically whitelists the sender; moving a message back into Slops removes the whitelist, and moving it into the Burn Bin is a signal that it's spam or malware, and the source is considered suspect.

inspired by Rands

Let's take the spam problem on by being aggressive about it.
People are dumb. If they see spam, some small percentage is going to buy from it. Therefore they shouldn't see it.

Every mail program knows how to filter. None of them (except, kinda sorta MH) is built around the idea that filtering and sorting is the most important thing. That's what we need.

I call the interface Buckets. It could be built on top of Thunderbird or GMail pretty easily. Here's how it works: your home screen is a set of icons that include counters of new mail. The icons are Friends, Family, Work, Hobbies and Slops. The user cannot change these. At the beginning of a user's experience with Buckets, all mail comes into Slops. The Slops bucket must be sorted; first by hand, later automatically. You cannot reply to a message in Slops: you must assign it to one of the other buckets or consign it to the Burn Bin. The buckets remember salient features of what you put into them - Subject, From, List headers and so forth. It might be a good use for CRM-114. Whenever confidence is high that a new message fits into a non-Slops bucket, it is automatically assigned. Spam is recognized as automatically as possible, here, and flagged.

Advanced users can create subsidiary Buckets inside the big ones. Mail is assessed for suitability in a subBucket only after it has qualified to escape Slops.

Every message has a Change My Bucket control.

Buckets stop showing older messages, but you can search for them or star them to stay on top. Messages are never deleted except by an explicit Kick The Bucket.

Search can happen over all Buckets or just the one you're in.

Now the radical part: automatic whitelisting and blacklisting. Moving a message into a Friends/Family/Work/Hobbies Bucket automatically whitelists the sender; moving a message back into Slops removes the whitelist, and moving it into the Burn Bin is a signal that it's spam or malware, and the source is considered suspect.

Books

_World War Z_, Max Brooks

In 1984, Whitley Strieber (who was to go on to, erm, lesser things) and James Kunetka published a book called _Warday_. It was a fictional oral history of a limited nuclear war between the US and the USSR.

_World War Z_ is an extremely similar book, only it's about the zombie war.

There are some good stories, some interesting vignettes, some standard horror stories, and some boring bits where I wondered about the magical nature of zombies in an otherwise rational world.

Books

_World War Z_, Max Brooks

In 1984, Whitley Strieber (who was to go on to, erm, lesser things) and James Kunetka published a book called _Warday_. It was a fictional oral history of a limited nuclear war between the US and the USSR.

_World War Z_ is an extremely similar book, only it's about the zombie war.

There are some good stories, some interesting vignettes, some standard horror stories, and some boring bits where I wondered about the magical nature of zombies in an otherwise rational world.