filter unwanted domains?

[Fraser Campbell]

On Friday 08 September 2006 15:56, Chris Aitken wrote:

> Is there a way I can set a rule or set up a filter to send messages to
> senders that they need to email me again and have me accept them? Then I

My $0.02 on that approach.

I used TMDA for about 2 years to do this automatically.  It worked very well 
(I got no spam).  Here is the rough approach I used

* pre-filter all mailing list mail to dedicated folders
* pre-populate my white list from all my known recipients
* pre-filter and whitelist a few domains from which I expect automated mails
  (chapters.ca for example)

The only emails I get from random senders are from people privately replying 
to mailing list messages I might have sent.  Those people are generally 
competent enough to read and understand the automated message I have sent 
them.  No doubt I missed a few emails but I don't care that much about it.

If you expected a lot of emails from random non-technical users then I think 
TMDA-like approaches would be much more trouble than they're worth.

I was very happy with TMDA's performance for me personally but the fact that I 
was generating emails to unknown recipients bothered me a bit.  Since lots of 
spam randomizes sender addresses this approach does (I suspect) result in a 
lot of innocent people getting the "junk" TMDA replies.

Now I use greylisting and it works very well for me.  Greylisting was 100% 
successful for me at first (zero non-list spams, versus 100-200 per day 
without greylisting) but these days 5-10 spams still get through.

I like greylisting because it doesn't end up in emails being silently 
discarded (spam folder or /dev/null) and (for legitimate senders) if 
something goes wrong they should at least be informed of the fact that their 
message bounced.

One issue issue with greylisting and TMDA is that neither approach addresses 
spam coming via mailing lists to which you subscribe.  That's not much of an 
issue for me since I don't have much patience for lists which don't control 
their spam problems.

-- 
Fraser Campbell <fraser-Txk5XLRqZ6CsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org>                 http://www.wehave.net/
Georgetown, Ontario, Canada                               Debian GNU/Linux
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