Al Bredenberg wrote the following on 9/21/02
>What do you mean by "white listing at the user level"? How would that work, >and how would it solve the spam problem? Sounds intriguing, but I think we >need more explanation. Thanks for your interest Al. OK, I'll sketch out the white listing concept a bit further. As things stand now, our mail boxes are open. Anyone in the world who wants to send a message to our email address can do so. Once these incoming mails have arrived in our email client most of us use some kind of filtering, or blacklists, to throw away certain predetermined types of messages. We let everybody in, and then we throw away the losers. If we wanted to use a non-Net analogy we might compare this to having a house with no doors. Anyone who wants to could enter our home, and then we run around all day chasing the unwelcome people out. White listing reverses this arrangement. White listing software would maintain a list of everybody we would like to receive mail from. It would log in to an email server and download any emails that were from someone on our "white list". It might then delete all the other messages. Or better yet, it could send an autoreply to senders of all the rejected messages offering an apology and an alternative means of contact. The rejected senders could be directed to a web page form. This form could be coded so the destination address is not harvestable, and so that human interaction would be required to operate the form. So, any stranger in the world who wanted to contact us could do so, but not by a bulk mail process. If we like this new stranger we add them to our white list, so they can thereafter contact directly via email. This wouldn't technically eliminate every bit of spam, because anyone could still submit the form to send us their "amazing offer!". But, if such a scheme were widely adopted by users, spammers would be denied the power of automation. Their businesses would not be able to sustain the cost of manually sending spams one by one by hand. There's lots more that can be said about white listing, but I don't wish to hog the mike. We might proceed by comparing the problems associated with white listing to the problems associated with black listing. Both systems have pros, and both have cons. Which way of organizing the email world gets us closer to "ending the spam era"? Thanks for your interest, look forward to any responses! Sincerely, Phil _______________________________________________ spamcon-general mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.spamcon.org/mailman/listinfo/spamcon-general#subscribers Subscribe, unsubscribe, etc: Use the URL above or send "help" in body of message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Contact administrator: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
