Somehow, or the other, I seemed to have touched on an emotional issue
for some-I added that it was FYI, and FWIW.
The emotion of the issues seemed to have clouded what I wrote.
The way it works is that the mail system on a gateway maintains a
whitelist, (where the whitelist is only available to the system
folks.) If an e-mail enters the system from the Internet with an
address that is not in the whitelist, the e-mail is archived, and the
sender sent a message asking for verification that the message was
really sent, and not spam, by hitting the 'R' button, and then "Send".
That verifies that the e-mail address actually belongs to a person, so
it is put in the whitelist.
After that, e-mail from the sender to anyone served by the gateway
passes unimpeded.
The sender is never asked another question.
All it has done is verify that the e-mail address really belongs to a
person.
From there on, e-mail from that address is handled normally-without
any other intervention, from the sender, and/or, the recipient(s).
I really don't understand what all the emotion is about ...
John
David W. Tamkin writes:
John, you acknowledge that you don't like it yourself and that valid mail
ends up undelivered because most senders have too much self-esteem to debase
themselves and lick the self-adoring whitelister's boots, yet you have not
only put effort into supporting this horrid idea but you have gone farther
and advertised your support of it; I'm surprised at you.
I really don't want to get started detailing my opinion on the matter, but
I've one thing to add to what Sean has already said. John wrote,
| If mailing lists are in the "whitelist", any message from a mailing
| list will be passed.
That's another part of the problem. Whitelisters don't update their
whitelists. They post to a public forum asking for help, and you take the
time and trouble to help them only to get back their arrogant "prove you'll
obey me or you aren't good enough for me to read your email" autoreply.
(They could whitelist the subject line, but NO. Most whitelisting setups
don't even allow for that, so many whitelisters can't; and those who can,
don't.) Or they send *you* private email that requests a response but they
don't whitelist you (nor the subject); you take the time and trouble to
answer only to get a haughty insult in return. But it's no surprise; after
all, notions of superiority to the rest of the human species almost always
include the expectation of never needing to lift a finger for oneself. I
did once see a setup that automatically whitelisted all addresses to whom
the user wrote; that was a small reduction in the intrinsic misguided
nonsense of it all.
| No, it works OK.
The only way it can work OK is if it doesn't function at all. If it does
what it was designed to do, it works horribly.
| I didn't particularly like it,
So why are you promoting it?
| ... but TMDA claims that their similar concept works very well for their
| clients.
If TMDA are selling software that does the same thing, they'll say anything
for sales' sake.
--
John Conover, conover(_at_)rahul(_dot_)net, http://www.johncon.com/
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