Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 79.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2003 07:10:12 +0100
From: "Jessica P. Hekman" <jphekman@arborius.net>
Subject: Re: 17.068 anti-spamming software?
On Mon, 9 Jun 2003, Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty
<willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>) wrote:
> Are there other anti-spamming devices we should all know about?
I feel like maybe I already mentioned this on this list, but just in case
-- I use TMDA (http://tmda.net/). It's a whitelist system (mail is
disallowed by default, allowed only if the address is in your whitelist).
You can do one of several things with the mail from someone not on your
whitelist, but the interesting feature of TMDA is the ability to send the
person a confirmation request: "answer this email and I'll believe you're
not a spammer, and your original mail will be released to Jessica." The
idea is that spammers don't generally send from legitimate email
addresses, so a confirmation request will be ignored. Real people have a
chance to say they're legit, and their mail gets through. I skim the list
of messages which didn't get confirmed daily, and I do find some people
who fail to answer the confirmation message; I release their message
myself at that time.
The downside is that some people find confirmation messages annoying. I
sympathize with this, but TMDA is still the best answer to spam I've seen
yet.
Jessica
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