Computing relationships: transactional algorithms yield to social networks

ABSTRACT

I had a bad email day on October 10 last year. First, a colleague in the States copied me on a response to an email he had just received for a meeting scheduled in New Zealand over a month earlier. The email seemed to have been filtered out by his university's email filter somehow, even though he and my local colleague who originated the email had been in regular contact for some time. The accompanying message read "The sender is not authorized to send to the destination. This can be the result of per host or per recipient filtering". Then I received notification that an email I had sent to Finland some five days earlier had not been received, with the message "Recipient address rejected: Greylisted for 60 seconds (see http:www.joensuu.fi/atteskus/ohjeet/postgrey.html)"...Mes sage could not be delivered for 5 days Message will be deleted from queue". Next came a warning on a message I had sent to Sweden "recipient address rejected: Greylisting in action, please try later... Warning message still undelivered after 4 hours. Will keep trying until message is 5 days old". Well I know that New Zealand is small and far from many other countries, but the thought that we had been globally blacklisted began to enter my mind. Paranoia was setting in...

REFERENCES

• 1: Paul-Alexandru Chirita , Jörg Diederich , Wolfgang Nejdl, MailRank: using ranking for spam detection, Proceedings of the 14th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management, October 31-November 05, 2005, Bremen, Germany [doi>10.1145/1099554.1099671]
• 2: P. Oscar Boykin , Vwani P. Roychowdhury, Leveraging Social Networks to Fight Spam, Computer, v.38 n.4, p.61-68, April 2005 [doi>10.1109/MC.2005.132]
• 3: Peter J. Denning , Andrew McGettrick, Recentering computer science, Communications of the ACM, v.48 n.11, November 2005 [doi>10.1145/1096000.1096018]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.4 Systems and Software
          Subjects: Information networks

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS
      H.4.3 Communications Applications
          Subjects: Electronic mail