Anti-spam ESP platforms. I would like Gmail and the other web-based Email Service Providers (hotmail, yahoo, aol, etc) to publish APIs to allow third-party developers to publish their own spam fighting algorithms. This would allow massive experimentation, and result in more rapid evolution of better anti-spam solutions than any one ESP can develop on their own.

I want these features in the Anti-spam ESP platforms:

1. Object types such as "MyFriends" (people you have received/ok'd and/or sent email before), and "MyBadWordsRegexps" (your own list of frequent bad words you get from non-friend spammers, noting that you should not do content filtering for your friends), MyBadSubjectRegeps, etc. Having objects allows efficient anti-spam programming instead of requiring the third party developer to add a freaking rule for every item.
   
   
2. Easy stats so you can see how often each of your items is used. This will help the developer make sure they don't waste time filtering for BadWords which in fact never come. (Allows developer to keep their anti-spam code and data really tight.)
   
   
3. Allow developers to publish their algorithm's URL so their friends can help test new algorithms.
   
   
4. Allow built-in actions such as ReallyDelete (for when you are absolutely sure a particular non-friend email is spam), HideButLabelAndArchive (for when you "think" a message is spam).
   
   
5. Allow developers to publish (or use) their own (or someone else's) sender identification protocols to allow more aggressive blacklisting and whitelisting.
   
   
6. Allow commercial anti-spam developers to sell their plug-ins by subscription or one-time fee.
   
   
7. Allow open source developers to easily publish their source code in the ESP's Anti-spam plug-in directory.
   
   
8. Allow developers to opt-in to having stats about their platform published to the net at large.
   
   

What else? I will update this post at my esp-antispam-apis.html page.

¶5:15 AM; digg