By Ed Burnette

Researchers at UCLA and the University of Florida have created a new type of distributed spam-filtering system that is more efficient and scalable than the alternatives in use today. Results of a large-scale prototype were published in the October edition of IEEE Computer.

The idea is simple:

Spammers send the same or similar messages to thousands of users; we have developed a system that lets users query all of their e-mail clients to determine if another user in the system has already labeled a suspect message as spam.

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