The great post from Chris Adams is just the kind of informed thoughtful threading that white listing deserves.
Chris doesn't vote for white listing in the end but his post is a great example of what could happen if we put half as much brain power in to white listing as we do in to black listing. >I particularly like that last idea - a challenge along the lines of >"Click on the portrait of the man next to the dog in this photo" should >be computationally infeasible for some time. There you go. In 10 minutes somebody has come up with a solution that is far better than my original image numbers concept. See how easy that is once we get going? Chris has solved that particular white listing obstacle. On to the next one. >There's also the problem of messages which don't come >from real people - postmaster, various autoresponders for websites, >etc. Would you want to be the guy at Yahoo who receives a flurry of >these every time an automatic notification goes out? In the current system, the Yahoo guy should use confirmed opt-in, which imposes an inconvenience upon his users, and loses him some of his audience. In a white list world, this confirm procedure can be replaced by the act of white listing, which involves an inconvenience for his users, and loses him some of his audience. Isn't the only difference one of technique and that in the white list world, the user, not Yahoo, has final control over whether they receive mail from Yahoo or not? If the Yahoo guy doesn't want to receive a zillion white list auto-replies he needs to do a better job of selling the value of his mailings on his web site. Perhaps I'm missing something here, but I don't see any real difference between bulk mail and personal mail in regards to white listing. If I want to hear from a business, or a person, I add them to the white list. Or I don't. Help me think it through, what am I overlooking? >Finally, the whole system is easily fooled if you don't use encryption >since I can easily forge the From address. Most people are going to >whitelist things like their postmaster or addresses used by popular >sites like Amazon's or ebay's confirmation messages and if Microsoft or >Netscape happened to whitelist their support address while adding >support into their mail clients... You can always tell the real techheads by who white lists their postmaster. :-) Seriously, I see the problem here and don't claim to have the perfect solution. And there probably isn't a perfect solution. Again, the current system is hardly a perfect solution either, is it? It is thoroughly riddled with MAJOR problems. All white listing has to do to be a viable alternative is have fewer problems. And finally, I have faith that when large groups of bright people like Chris put their minds to it, a lot of these kinds of obstacles can be substantially reduced. Great thread, keep it coming! 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]
