Bill Evans wrote,
E> ... [I]f a whitelist user misses an occasional piece of mail and that
E> doesn't bother him, what is the problem with using a whitelist?
[N.B.: Bill is using the word "whitelist" the same way I have been using it.]
Bill does let unwhitelisted senders know that their messages will not be read
(unless re-sent with his bypass word), and that is not nearly so bad as si-
lently trashing it. I think the one thing to be aware of is that rejecting
non-whitelisted mail does give people a certain impression; if a whitelister
knows that and is content to have that kind of reputation, then I guess that
the only problems are (1) that Bill is so positive that he misses only an
occasional piece of email [even that may not be a problem if he logs rejected
mail and sees for himself the number of pieces that are rejected] and (2)
that he is so very sure that everything he misses is unimportant.
But something tells me that if a potential employer likes your resume, and
the person there who might hire you emails you to invite you for an interview
but gets an autoresponse of "I don't read mail unless it says `tiglet',"
someone else will get the job. As I said yesterday, errors in a whitelist
have worse consequences than errors in a blacklist.
E> Folks should consider letting through everything whose Subject: line
E> begins with Re:.
I've seen spam that has "Re:" subjects, so I would recommend treating "Re:"
as a factor reducing the likelihood that the message is spam but not as a
guarantee of legitimacy.
wotan(_at_)netcom(_dot_)com wrote,
W> Procmail should make it easier to handle email without losing the good
W> stuff. Not make it hard for reasonable people to communicate easily with
W> each other.
Procmail does make it easier to handle email; losing good email and impeding
reasonable communication are results of users' procmailrc recipes, not the
raw inevitable result of using procmail. We need to fix the mindsets, not
the source code.
I'm going to repeat one of my earliest comments on this list: procmail is
amoral. If you write recipes that trash mail from your spouse into /dev/null
or send a "you filthy spammer" autoresponse to mail from your boss, that's
not an inherent characteristic of procmail; it's your own doing.