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September 10, 2004
Stopping spam the hard way
Slashdot has a post up talking about a "new" way to avoid spam and viruses in e-mail.
What is this hot new thing? Avoid e-mail altogether and instead just use a private system to talk to each other.
Or course this isn't anything revolutionary and if you have a network, one way you can do this with your existing network is to block port 25 on the firewall. No messages can go in or outside of your network and therefore your system is now closed.
No need for the additional programming.
Incidentally, this reminds me of what DeWitt Clinton was theorizing about on his blog several weeks back - a closed system that was invite only (except he was suggesting to tie it into a friend of a friend system like the now largely useless and evil Friendster).
Posted by Eric at September 10, 2004 01:43 PM
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I would imagine that part of the issue with the big mailers like Yahoo/Gmail/etc is that if they have a feature, there are going to be people that turn it on and don't get it - then complain when they don't get new mail from new people.
I know savvy users wouldn't have this issue - but speaking from experience of dealing with the mass public on other sites I use - there are people out there that are unfathomably not savvy about tech stuff.
I am in agreement with you though that, if you don't need to get e-mails from people out of the blue - then a "whitelist only" solution is a far better system than this "dmail" stuff.
Posted by: Eric at September 11, 2004 03:49 PM
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference 'Stopping spam the hard way' from spamblogging.
my ex-girlfriend only accepts email from addresses on her whitelist. No spam gets to her whatsoever. I couldn't believe how simple her solution was.
Of course she can't get a random email from soneone she doesn't know, but really how often would she want that anyway? Instead she saves plenty of time and headache having to deal with spam.
This solution isn't suitable for the overly social webloggers out there or businesses that need to have open email, but it solves the problem for the 90% of others who use email. Email proviiders like Yahoo and MSN need to push this solution better to their users.
Posted by: Hashim at September 11, 2004 12:17 PM