Geodog

Does Habeas anti-spam service work?

I just signed up for Habeas' anti-spam service after receiving an email from Glenn Fleishman with Habeas' headers embedded in it. The way the service works is that in return for promising not to spam (long legal document) and agreeing to have your IP address blacklisted if you do, you receive information on how to configure your email program to insert Habeas' 9 copyrighted and trademarked headers in your outgoing emails. If spammers use the headers, Habeas sues them based on trademark and copyright law (= big damages). Supposedly, recognition of Habeas' headers gets built into spam filters, and your email having a Habeas header gets it past the spam filters. I've had problems with my mail server getting put on one of the blacklists (SPEWS) because it was co-located with a spammer, so this might come in handy.

Does this work? I don't know. It certainly puts a butt ugly bunch of headers at the top of your email that are very visible in my old version of Eudora. I don't know if they are visible in other mail clients. The tradeoff between having all my mail looking butt ugly and making the maximum effort to make sure that it gets through might not be worthwhile. Also, this system needs widespread adoption to work - the fact that the user number I was assigned was less than 2,000 didn't inspire confidence. I wonder how deterred by the threat of a lawsuit in US courts Russian pornographers who fill up my spam folder are going to be. I fear that in the end a Habeas header might come to be as reliable a positive indicator of spam as the unsubscribe link is today. Still, it's free for personal use and it seems worth a try.

I'd be interested if anyone else has thoughts on this, or actual experience using the service. I'll post back in a month with the results of my trial.