[Oberon] White-List and spam

[John Drake]

Hello all,

This is a very good topic!  I primarily use Yahoo for
my "non-work" email.  It has an "ok" spam filter.
Similairly to what Douglas pointed out putting the
having "spam suspect" email in another folder makes
dumping spam much easier.  (Thankfully I only get
about 15 spams per day so I usually only have one
page to scan and I can hit "delete all").  I like
the idea of a Baysean filter too.  It's mentioned
here.

http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html

I don't beleive that Yahoo is using Baysean 
filtering, because while they're "pretty" good,
I would think it would to a better job of
filtering "Micrsoft Security Patch" spams
(virus?) by now. :)  (I HATE those especially
because they are usually over 100K and fill
up my in box quick!)

As for the "challenge response" idea, I'm not sure
if I like that quite as much.  I'm thinking of the
times that I do have to send email to someone for
the first time.  I guess it's not a heavy price
to pay.  One alternative would to simply ping
the mail server in question.  MANY spams
I get are from totally bogus email addresses.
Of course spammers could wise up and start using
fake email addresses that at least have valid
servers.  (ie. goofyboy at hotmail.com)  It would
be nice if mail servers let you automatically
validate if an address was good without having
to actually send an email.

Regards,

John M. Drake

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com