[ih] Kill-file/Cancel-Index/Spam arms race Re: DMARC [was "Father of e-Marketing"]

[Greg Skinner]

> On Jun 3, 2019, at 4:06 PM, Bill Ricker <bill.n1vux at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 4:54 PM Brian E Carpenter
> <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Maybe we can talk here about the history of anti-spam techniques.
>> When was the kill file invented?
> 
> Wikipedia says the Killfile was first in Larry Wall's 'rn', but
> doesn't say which rev it was added to; implies that Jerry Pournelle
> was the feature request in 1986, so likely about then?
>   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file#cite_note-pournelle198603-1 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file#cite_note-pournelle198603-1>

Offhand, I don’t know what rev it was added to.  I poked around the net.sources archive in Google Groups, and the earliest rev I found was 4.1, from 1984.  The following link will get you to search results for that rev, hopefully:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/net.sources/rn$20version$204.1;context-place=topicsearchin/net.sources/rn <https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/net.sources/rn$20version$204.1;context-place=topicsearchin/net.sources/rn>

I know of some mentions of kill file use, such as the following 1985 post from Chuq von Rospach, who wore several Usenet hats, such as moderator and code contributor:

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/net.singles/C3xfuAe_Ipw/discussion <https://groups.google.com/d/topic/net.singles/C3xfuAe_Ipw/discussion>

> A little closer to Spam control, the Usenet Cancel Index dates to c.
> 1994-09-30 per
>   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breidbart_Index
> which has footnote [1]  that links
>   https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/news.admin.misc/EZYlshMcULU/GRCnSMAVf24J
> (Anyone wishing to dig further into that, the eponymous Seth still has
> same email address via Panix. Saw him just this last Saturday at a
> Scotch event. MAP would approve.)
> 
> The Killfile.org archived Usenet FAQ doesn't appear to have history
> going back far enough to answer anything, but likely has useful
> reminders.
> http://wiki.killfile.org/projects/usenet/faqs/ <http://wiki.killfile.org/projects/usenet/faqs/>

Cancelling posts with control messages (“cmsg cancel”) was part of the basic mechanism for article distribution, briefly discussed in RFC 850 <https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc850>.  I would have to poke around Google Groups to look for earlier examples of post cancellation.

—gregbo

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