Whitelist/verification spam filters

[Gerhard Häring]

Erik Max Francis wrote in comp.lang.python:
> "David Mertz, Ph.D." wrote:
> 
>> A lot of my correspondents have flakey email systems, and might miss
>> the
>> confirmation requests.  Many of them are non-native English speakers,
>> and might misunderstand the purpose of the automated response.  Even
>> more of them use multiple email messages, and the automated response
>> might not go to the address(es) they want to write me from.  Some are
>> lazy, and some leave school or work around the time a confirmation
>> message arrives.  I am quite certain that using a
>> whitelist/verification
>> system would wind up excluding a significant number of messages that I
>> would otherwise wish to receive.
> 
> I agree with all of this.  Furthermore, the more general social issue
> that whitelists raise is a kind of obnoxious selfishness.  In order to
> contact you legitimately, I have to go through hoops in order to do it
> if you have a whitelist system in place.

Hoops? Takes me at most one second. You do that /one time/ with an
automatic whitelisting system, like TMDA's. I'll likely switch to TMDA
one day, too, as the spam problem is inherent in the SMTP protocol,
and as long as SMTP doesn't go away, spam won't either IMO.

> Perhaps it's just me, but I find it annoying having to go through
> hoops to contact someone for legitimate purposes.  It's the same
> kind of thing, although more so, as people using mangled email
> addresses on Usenet.

These are antisocial idiots. Here's an english resource that explains
why:

http://www.redballoon.net/~snorwood/antispam.html (section "Address
munging")

Gerhard
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