The problem with robot spam filters of any sophistocation will always be the false-positive, and the problem with using Nocem-style of distributed tagging to handle those spams is that the system can become abused by outsiders who get into the ratings board. But Pathway Communications may have found an even better solution: Filtering the false-positives using the idle time of call-centre employees.

an optional $1-per-month-per-mailbox service that employs workers in India who review every single piece of spam sequestered from a mail queue by the spam filter. "It's fairly easy for a trained individual to figure out what spam is," he says. "We want to offer another filter layer not to catch spam, which the appliance does, but to catch false positives." For anyone who has missed an important message due to a strict spam filter, this could be a big plus.

Their NetPulse first-defense is based on the same Spam Assassin software we use here at Teledynamics, but cascaded with Pathway's own proprietary filtering technology (where we use the Bayesian-based ifile) and then routed to call center folks in India.