Email Prioritization

Email Prioritization is a server-level anti-spam technique developed at HP Labs, Bristol. It was first proposed in a technical report, and presented at the 2004 Usenix Annual Technical Conference in Boston, Massachusetts.

What does it do?

What's in it for me?

How does it work?

Spam not only clogs inboxes and wastes users' time; it often slows the delivery of legitimate e-mail due to the sheer volume of junk passing through corporate servers. As a result, some companies could be forced to invest in more robust hardware to keep mail flowing at acceptable speeds.

But there's a less expensive way to speed legitimate messages through the system: by classifying them as probable "good" or "junk" mail before they're sent to be scanned.

Servers tend to be "faithful". In other words, if a server sent a good message before, it's likely to send a good one next time, too; if it sent junk before, chances are high that it's sending junk again. "New" servers that have no history of sending mail to your system before are probably sending spam. Servers can detect the sending IP address from a message header, before the full message is scanned for viruses or spam content and sent for delivery, so those likely to be deemed "good" can go to the head of the queue for processing.

(from PCWorld article HP Labs Develops Spam ID System)

But I don't run a mail server.

Then I'm afraid that Email Prioritization can't help you.

Can't we just stop spam altogether?

No.