[Tutor] A NOVEL IDEA- no more spam!

[Kirk Bailey]

OK, recently I saw a site with an intresting idea. SPAM PROOFING.

Idea is, it maintains a list of people who may send email to you. Anyone else
sends in a email, they get one back, explaining it is in storage for 7 days,
they have to go there, put in their address and a brief explanation of why they
should be allowed to email you, then click submit on the form. This unlocks
their identity and they can send email to you. After 7 days, any message is
deleted.

Almost all spam is robotic, this process will never happen. The owner of such
email account is spamproof.

This can be somewhat simplified. No 7 day stuff, you're not in the list, you get
/dev/nul in your face. You want on the  list, you go to a form and ask to be
placed there, or even simpler, click a url in a person's sig block and go to a
form to do so yourself. Again, no robot will be doing this.

Local delivery is handed off by sendmail to a program called mail, usually
located in '/bin' (ok, in my FreeBSD setup, it is in '/usr/bin/' Now,  of we
wrap a shell around it, we could look at the message and examine it's From:
field and TO: field, open the user's OK.2mail file (just made the name up, DON'T
PANIC!), and IF THE SENDER IS IN THERE we run mail and hand off the message,
OTHERWISE we send off a terse email explaining the situation with the correct
link included- and toss away the email. The FROM field is to an alias which
feeds directly into /dev/nul so bounces from fraudulent and cancelled accounts
just go away.
 
Gee, I wonder what language to write the scripts in...     ;-)

This is the roughing out the concept stage, hacking at a large pad with my box
of crayons and wishing I had a beer. Anyone else want to toss a cinderblock in
the wading pool along side mine? If the list does not think this is the palace
to kick this around, we can take it off list- and I know a place that provides
great free list service...

-- 

end

Respectfully,
             Kirk D Bailey


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