[Oberon] White-List and spam

[Douglas G. Danforth]

Thomas Frey wrote:
> We also came up with some simple strategies to avoid SPAM:
> White-List/Challenge - Approach:
> Each recevied mail is checked against a white-list of known senders. If it
> does not match, 
[
> a challenge mail is sent to the sender of the mail.
> The challenge can not be answered by a machine. (e.g. selecting a picture /
> reading a word in a noisy picture / selecting a word out of a text)
> The approach could be enhanced by a bayesian filter.
]

Just a brief comment.  I recently realized that a poor mans version of a 
white-list [without the challange] can be easily implemented with 
Netscape mail and its message filters.  Previously I had a large number 
of filters vainly trying to catch all of the spam but gave up.  In its 
place I have one filter which contains my white-list which directs all 
acceptible messages to my "box" folder and leaves all the rest of the 
messages in the "inbox".  This is a big win.  I still have to visually 
scan the "inbox" titles but can do that much more rapidly since now 99+% 
of them are guarenteed to be spam.  I then just delete all messages in 
the inbox.  Practically and psychologically this is much better than 
what I had been doing.  I get in excess of 100 spam messages a day.

-Doug