Social Networks and Email Whitelists

Here’s the idea:

Use social networks to automatically build email whitelists.  How often do you actually get real email from a total stranger.  Chances are they know you or know a friend of yours. Your whitelist would be safe as long as nobody in your social network is a friend of a spammer or whitelists a spammer. If that friend does whitelist a spammer, maybe you should reevaluate your friendship ;) and remove him from you social network.

This would be best implemented by some entity that provides both an email service and a social network service (*cough*Google*cough*).

Or it could be implemented in a P2P fashion. It wouldn’t be as quick or efficient, but it would get the job done. I suppose the depth of the search could be limited to improve performance.

2 Responses to “Social Networks and Email Whitelists”

  1. Anonymous Says:

    PGP is already built in such a way that you build a circle of trust via signing keys; it probably would work too.

  2. Victor Grishchenko Says:

    See http://oc-co.org/p2pwl.
    Relax greylisting with automatically created whitelists of reputable MTAs; share those whitelists with peer MTAs.

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