life in a smart mob

social networking and other stuff

Whitelists

After months and months of over 100 junk emails a night i decided to start using a whitelist - or deny anyone who i don't know. Is taking me a while to build up the "safe list" but Outlook 2003 does a pretty good job of helping me with that.

But shouldn't ISP's be doing a better job of stopping stuff that obviously is spam? (despite my ongoing desire to purchase Avogadros Number of Chinese Viagra pills).

Anyone else operate on a "whitelist only" basis?? Hmm, just as well i didn't send this by email or you would never have seen it. My only issue :)

vtgo.net

Posted: Feb 09 2004, 10:17 AM by stevenL | with 8 comment(s)

Comments

Duncan said:

Would you also need an additional way for people to request being added to the white list? - like a web page that you have to fill in the "hidden number" or something.
# February 9, 2004 5:22 AM

Steven Livingstone said:

Would be a nice idea... this would be even easier if you could configure Outlook to use a remote trust list :)
# February 9, 2004 5:27 AM

Michal Chaniewski said:

An idea...
Create a separate folder in Outlook for requests for adding people to whitelist... Drop there all emails from people not on whitelist, but with ADD_ME_TO_WHITELIST in subject, delete all other. Simple, Outlook-based, and easy to explain to people.
# February 9, 2004 7:06 AM

Christoffer Skjoldborg said:

Check out this handy, little, free tool: http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/
Works very nicely. I initially trained it (3-4 months ago) to recognise spam by giving it a couple of hundred spam messages as examples. Ever since then it has simply filtered all spam messages into a seperate outlook folder and deleted them. Once in a while it has its doubts about whether a message really is spam. Such messages will be put into a special junk prospects folder for you to deal with manually. I have never seen it categorise non-spam as spam.
# February 9, 2004 8:12 AM

jeff said:

I'm using IPSwitch's Imail on the server and it's blocking 99% of spam. I'm shocked at how good it really is, and "false positives" are rare. It just takes some careful tweaking to find which DNS black lists work bests, and updating their word lists from time to time.
# February 9, 2004 9:09 AM

Phil Weber said:

Hi, Steven: I use Qurb, which builds a whitelist automatically based on messages I've sent. It can optionally send an automatic "challenge/response" message to senders who are not on the list. Check it out at http://www.qurb.com.
# February 9, 2004 9:24 AM

Travis Laborde said:

I must chime in on the "Qurb" suggestion. Qurb has given me back my Inbox.

The general issue with whitelist protection is for people how legitimately get lots of email from "new" contacts all the time. In my case, the amount of legitimate new contacts is small, so whitelist is wonderful. Qurb makes it as painless as possible.

When you install, it goes through your sent items and creates your whitelist for you. It allows people to "opt-in" to your whitelist very easily. You'd think that this makes it easy for spammers to opt in. This is the part that is very amusing. Since most spammers dont have valid "reply to" addresses, they dont get the Qurb opt-in email :)
# February 9, 2004 11:00 AM

Nadine said:

He?ich kapier null!
# March 28, 2004 10:30 AM
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