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Comment by thefreeman | Hacker News Reader

Not a bad idea.

One issue I could see though is the initial email would essentially devolve into a "poke". Nobody would bother writing anything in it, which would mean the spam filters would have nothing to filter on.

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>One issue I could see though is the initial email would essentially devolve into a "poke". Nobody would bother writing anything in it, which would mean the spam filters would have nothing to filter on.

that is a good thing: if the first message contains something else that is not just "poke", it's spam.

But spammers would just send "pokes" as well. The system would have nothing to go on besides the reputation of the sender when a poke is initiated, so this is no different then just sending encrypted text to begin with.

It can't just be a poke because why would you reply to someone you don't know? The email has to be sufficiently interesting to convince you to reply, while not containing any confidential information.

Because of my original point. That because it is required to start every email conversation, no one will actually put anything in it, or certainly much less context then you get currently. Which just makes spam prevention and detection harder meaning you will have to wade through more attempts which get through.

The person I replied to said that "anything that isn't a poke would be spam". Do you really think spammers are that stupid?

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