From: shamrock@netcom.com (Lucky Green)
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 1996 10:35:18 +0800
To: bryce@digicash.com
Subject: Re: Need PGP-awareness in common utilities
Message-ID: <v02120d19ae04adc45a15@[192.0.2.1]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 23:56 7/6/96, bryce@digicash.com wrote:

>Hm.  That might be an interesting addition to my plan, but the
>first step is to generate ratings and to consume them at each
>individual's mail-handling site.  So I, for example, would run a
>script every time I received mail (or every hour, or every day,
>etc) which looked for ratings certificates, PGP-verified them,
>and saved the rating in a database.  Then I would run another
>script (every time I received mail, or every hour, etc.) which
>identified incoming messages and _did_ something to them if
>there were sufficient ratings in the database to merit _doing_
>something to them (e.g. delete, promote to a "well-rated"
>folder, demote to a "poorly-rated" folder, forward to my
>friends, forward to my enemies, etc.).

As has been discussed in numberous previous threads on this topic, even a
passive rating system is very hard to implement. The computer doesn't know
if you hit delete because the post was garbage or because you are running
late on some project. An active rating system is virtually impossible to
implement, given the added workload on the readers.

Good lucky anyway,



-- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com>
   PGP encrypted mail preferred.
   Disclaimer: My opinions are my own.