AT&T’s anti-anti-spam patent
Dan Gillmor’s eJournal – AT&T’s Anti-Anti-Spam Patent:
“A system and method for circumventing schemes that use duplication detection to detect and block unsolicited e-mail (spam.) An address on a list is assigned to one of m sublists, where m is an integer that is greater than one. A set of m different messages are created. A different message from the set of m different messages is sent to the addresses on each sublist. In this way, spam countermeasures based upon duplicate detection schemes are foiled.”
The mind boggles at the willingness of the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office to grant patents to the most trivial ideas. Some commentators note that perhaps the patent can be used for good and not evil.
