[Design] conditional e-mail filtering

[Mimi Yin]

Hi Philip,

We've explored email/spam filtering as one of the many use cases  
informing designs for a more generic GUI Rule Builder. We're not  
planning on tackling this set of functionality in 0.7, but we have  
written up some pretty detailed designs for it in the past. They  
include:

+ Fill in a sample detail view and create a rule based on that (ie.  
Gmail)
+ Use an "attribute-browser" like interface to specify parameters
+ Select an item and build an item off the characteristics of that item.

For more detailed (and probably slightly out-dated) explanation, see:  
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Projects/RuleBuilder

Mimi

On Jan 13, 2006, at 5:44 AM, Philip Trauring wrote:

> I've posted about e-mail filtering before, and the hope that  
> chandler will support some advanced filtering options, and this is  
> one more possibility I'd like to suggest.
>
> Obviously spam is a problem we all have to deal with, and although  
> spam filters have come along quite a bit in the past few years,  
> they can't cover all possibilities. One area of spam that I've  
> noticed spam filters have a lot of trouble with is phishing-type e- 
> mails addressed from popular sites like ebay, amazon, etc.  
> Obviously if you want e-mails from these sites (and have filters to  
> organize them) then some of the phishing e-mails will make it  
> through. Some spam filters have started to address this issue by  
> looking for phishing-style links, but this is a difficult task.
>
> Ebay, in response to these phishing e-mails, has started putting  
> one's ebay id in all of the e-mails they send, so you know it's  
> coming from them. This is a great idea. I would imagine other sites  
> will follow this, since spammers in theory cannot know one's id on  
> a given site (assuming the site doesn't show e-mail addresses or  
> that it hasn't been hacked).
>
> This opens up a great way to eliminate phishing e-mails from these  
> types of sites. For ebay, for example, I would set up a filter that  
> would look for e-mails coming from ebay.com - and then check if my  
> username is included in the e-mail - if my username is not included  
> in the text, then the e-mail is sent to the trash. If the username  
> is found, then a different action can be triggered.
>
> In fact this can be generalized to allow other functionality. For  
> example, you add one or more filters that must be matched (i.e.  
> from address includes ebay.com) and then you add a conditional set  
> of filters (i.e. text contains my username) and then specify  
> actions that are carried out for both the true (i.e. filter into an  
> 'ebay' folder) and false (i.e. move to trash) possibilities of the  
> second set. The true/false option might be compared to an 'if/then/ 
> else' function.
>
> You might also allow multiple conditional responses. This would be  
> useful for sites that send out multiple mailing lists from the same  
> generic e-mail address. I have some mailing lists I get from the  
> same site, where the e-mail address is always the same and they  
> don't even put the mailing list title in the subject. In this case  
> I could create the initial requirement being the e-mail address and  
> then search for specific text in each e-mail to match up with each  
> mailing list, and then filter accordingly.
>
> That's it,
>
> Philip Trauring
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