Of course, I did most of my experiments on my own email. Lars, you were exposed to the first phase, which essentially required every user to register on a grey list pending white listing. This required aliases for computer-generated mail such as from banks and the like but produced quite some infinite mail loop headaches. Eventually, it seemed to work well for me. However, I have literally annoyed more people than not. Many close friends not already white listed made comment. I pulled the plug when my own father gave me a call. It’s a damn shame though. I really expected people would ask for the same system themselves. Why is it so hard to reply to an email with a certain subject line or click on a link?

The second phase kept the white and black lists, aliases, but included, as you say, a second spam filter (actually two spam filters). This required constantly teaching of SpamAssassin. I suppose SpamAssassin has become the benchmark upon which spammers test their works because just recently spam started to come through despite fine tuned conditioning.

The third phase as (or perhaps because) you suggest is quite similar to phase zero. Phase Four is out of my hands: DomainKeys Identified Mail.

No, okay – all sillyness aside, I was actually thinking about the approach you had about white-listing people by giving them a reply-message and letting them answer a question to prove they were sincere emailers and not a spam-bot. Is that approach described anywhere by you?

I know I thought that approach was cumbersome, but it would definetely sort out most spammers and also the ignorant people who wouldn’t be able to write you. Totally unlike this blog, where any ass-wife can leave a comment.

“To understand everything is to forgive everything”

Hindu Prince Gautama Siddharta, the founder of Buddhism, 563-483 B.C.

“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before…He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.”
-Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

I am starting to think you are correct. I’ve learned the ins-and-outs of the otherwise completely asinine streaming ‘programming language’ procmail. While I like the greater white list control, address expiration messages, and the ability to create numerous aliases (alex.youtube@whatever.com), teaching spam assassin through ssh is an infinitely bigger pain in the butt than the “Report Spam” button. However, Gmail does not allow one to filter on the message headers nor up the spam aggressiveness. I have a higher tolerance for false positives (deleted ham) than false negatives (spam).

But Lars, consider well the words of the late Kurt and be scared. Be scared.