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Re: Certified Mail Delivery agent

2001-12-12 20:38:06
Mark <admin(_at_)asarian-host(_dot_)net> wrote,

| I hate to burst someone's bubble, but this whole concept is flawed from
| the get-go.

Clearly Mark and I are on the same side of the greater issue, but I disagree
with this:

| You may think you are playing
| it safe when you are individually allowing email addresses from, say,
| "hisdomain.com"; but what you have in fact done, is allow spammers access
| to your mailbox with a key that can be created as easily as typing an
email
| address.

Not really.  No spammer has keeps a database of the keywords or tricks for
getting through each address's defenses.  (If they did, a greenlist wouldn't
work either.)  Whitelisting and greenlisting do keep spam from the user's
eyes, but whitelisting does so in exchange for losing much legitimate email,
turning the user into a sender of unsolicited, unwanted email, and ruining
the user's personal relationships by proclaiming his/her bloated opinion of
him/herself.

[Some people's uses of "whitelist" and "greenlist" are the transposition of
the way I use them.  As I use the terms, a whitelist works like this: if the
sender is on the whitelist, accept the message; if the sender is not on the
whitelist, reject it as spam.  A greenlist works like this: if the sender is
on the greenlist, accept the message without further testing; if the sender
is not on the greenlist, examine the content (not necessarily just the body,
but perhaps also the subject and the routing and a blacklist/redlist of
senders from whom any mail is unacceptable) to determine whether it seems to
be spam or not.  What to pick as the "sender" of a message is yet another
question.]



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