[Gllug] Whitelist-only spam filtering

[Sean Burlington]

Rev Simon Rumble 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.)
> 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.
> 
> So can anyone recommend some whitelist code that has thought through
> the problems inherent in such a system?  Ideally any such system
> would be able to hook into mutt so I can whitelist the address at the
> press of a key.
> 


that sounds kind of extreme to me !

I've been getting worried about the spam wars since MPs have started to 
get in on the act and News stories feature young girls being horrified 
to discover adverts for porn in their (parentally controllled AOL) email 
boxes.


When I start hearing such scare stories I start to worry about what 
controls are on thier way (for your own good)...


Now I don't like spam, but it's a lot less annoying than advertisers 
phoning me at home  and a lot less wastefull than the buckets of 
junkmail I throw away.

And I really love having a communications medium that is largely 
ouitside of the control of big organisations.

Anonymous remailers provided a valuable service for whistle-blowers and 
pollitical dissidents --- we have already lost these in the name of the 
war on spam.

Do we really want an internet where only authorised servers are able to 
handle email ?

If that happens you can bet that it will be companies like Microsoft and 
AOL that end up doing the authorising...

-- 

Sean

This isn't a holy war is it ?!

not like Vi vs Emacs ;)


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