[Techtalk] simple mail filtering via whitelist - suggestions?

[Rasjid Wilcox]

On Saturday 06 March 2004 18:00, Kai MacTane wrote:
> At 3/5/04 03:58 PM , Travis Casey wrote:
> >What I'd like to do is create a "whitelist" of approved senders, and let
> >mail from them go on to her.  Anything from someone else would be
> >redirected to me.
>
> For a 5-year-old, this sounds pretty reasonable. Especially given some of
> the stuff that's out there. Have you looked into TMDA?  I suspect it's very
> nearly what you want. I don't know about that "redirect to you" part; that
> might take a bit of hacking. But the rest of your spec is almost exactly
> what TMDA already does. When it receives an email from a non-whitelisted
> source, it sends back an automated reply asking the person to reply to it.
> When they do, they're added to the whitelist. Stops spam wonderfully well,
> since spammers don't bother letting mail come back to themselves.

But this is the fundamental problem with TMDA systems.  All those 'please 
confirm this message' go somewhere.  In the case of spam, that somewhere is 
generally not the spammer, but some innocent bystander (either the owner of 
the fake return envelope address, or some postmaster).  So as a 'cure' for 
spam, in my view TMDA systems are generally as bad as the original problem.  
They really just shift the problem to someone else.

> So, if you can just redirect its output, you should be all set.

However, with this modification (which should not be hard depending on what 
language the TMDA system is written in) the problems of TMDA systems go away, 
and I think Travis' needs would be met.

If Travis finds one written in Python, I would be happy to have a quick look 
at patching it.

Cheers,

Rasjid.

-- 
Rasjid Wilcox
Canberra, Australia (UTC +11 hrs)
http://www.openminddev.net