Building a better Mailtrap

Gregory Alan Bolcer (gbolcer@gambetta.ICS.uci.edu)
Wed, 03 Jun 1998 08:15:00 -0700


We have birds in the walls. My roommate thought it was mice,
and tried to kill them by spraying ant spray in the cracks. My
other roommate thought he was crazy, not for using bug spray on
mice, but for thinking that there was anything in the wall
in the first place. Leave it to me to save the household by
going out and buying a couple of mousetraps. It soon became
obvious that some bird had built a nest in there by going in
through an open vent in the roof and down into the cavity.
Despite figuring it out, my roommates still believe in
mice and prove this point by keeping peanut butter laden
traps right by the toilet. Needless to say, this will scare
the shit out of you if you need to get up in the middle of
the night (if you know what I mean). Last night I heard
my dog yipe at the top of his lungs immediately after
the snap of one of the traps. He never goes into the bathroom,
but the door had been closed for so long, he wanted to
see what was going on. I never laughed so hard in my life.
You can use mousetraps to train dogs for all sorts of things,
not peeing on the carpet, not sitting on the couch, staying
away from the roses, etc. It's very pavlovian.

Why stop there? Why not make a FoRK intelligent
mail service? Make it automatically match your
post against previous postings and the Internet
joke archive so you don't get 10 of the same jokes
posted. I saw a really good presentation at WWW/6
from the Altavista research team. They had a poor
man's solution to the broken link and versioning problem. A broken
link on Altavista would route you to the nearest document
in the domain that had the highest percentage of being
the same document plus some changes.

You could automatically match against the SPAM archive
and also the internet joke archive in order to
bounce back messages that had more than 60% match (minus
the '>' lines) with a message: Do you really
want to post that? Isn't that the same as <<insert
FoRK links here>>. If it matches over 90% you outright
reject it and tell the person to get a life; if it
matches higher than 97%: You hereby forefeit all
your rights as a poster, indemnify FoRK members for
all maliscious DOS attacks on you, and are legally
liable and will willingly reimburse your ISP for
any damages that result from such retribution.

Greg

Smart negative conditioning, droogies.

> I agree 100% as well.
> I've replied privately as asked, but I wanted to
> share my opinion publicly.
> (I cant stop coming out of the closet into the public :)
>
> I use and like majordomo the best, along with
> wilma for web based archives.
> I run both on 'egg.microsoft.com' which I use
> for some list hosting and archving.
>
> Majordomo does have some neat fetures,
> only subscribers can post, moderation,
> auto appending of suffixes.
> (Like @bottom: to unsubscribe blah blah )
> Also includes moderated subscriptions including
> the two stage confirmed subscribe, which I think
> is cool.
> You can also do neat things like munge the subject
> for easy filtering is you want like prefix subjects
> with 'FORK>'
>
> Rohit, if you feel inclined, you can look at my setup
> on egg.
>