[Gllug] Whitelist-only spam filtering

[Tom Gilbert]

* Rev Simon Rumble (simon at rumble.net) wrote:
> A discussion took place about spam last night at Dorkbot which got me
> thinking.  I've now had too many false-positives from all the various
> blacklists.  I'm also spending too much time maintaining spam blocks.
> I'm thinking of experimenting with whitelist-only email.
> 
> As far as I can see, there are two approaches to this kind of system:
> 1) Filter anything that isn't in the whitelist to a box and manually
>    maintain the whitelist every so often. (Perhaps even with a
>    temporary whitelist for addresses that I have emailed in the past x
>    unit of time.)

This is going to involve you reading a lot of spam for a long time. (As
you "maintain" the whitelist). This kindof defeats the point :(

> 2) Use a challenge-reponse system for addresses that aren't in the
>    whitelist so they can get themselves into the whitelist without my
>    input.

Ugh. This is highly offensive to people sending you mail. Frankly when I
get messages bounced from people saying "send the message again with
this SECRIT PASSWORD so I can add you to my whitelist", I never send
them another mail.

Yes, blacklists don't work:
http://www.paulgraham.com/falsepositives.html

Sensible ideas for filtering spam:
http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html

And some programs that use above methods:
http://www.paulgraham.com/filters.html
(I recommend spamprobe or bogofilter).

Tom.
-- 
   .^.    .-------------------------------------------------------.
   /V\    | Tom Gilbert, London, England | http://linuxbrit.co.uk |
 /(   )\  | Open Source/UNIX consultant  | tom at linuxbrit.co.uk    |
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