Re: FN-FORUM: Boxtrapper

date posted 21st November 2007 10:20

> Boxtrapper works by whitelisting verified email addresses and only
> delivering mail from whitelisted sources.

Whitelisting e-mail addresses isn't very clever. It's easy to forge From:
addresses in e-mails, and this is often done by spammers, they quite often
send things from you to get past such whitelists.

> If you were to send me an email and you were not whitelisted then that
> message would be placed in a queue and you would receive an email asking
> you
> to verify that you are a real human being and not an automated mailer.

No! not another one! This just annoys legitimate senders, including
potential customers. It's also a real pain when you sign up for forums,
etc. as the sending machine can't reply to the "prove you're a human"
message. I get a few of these on the forums I run...

> I know that people are inherently lazy or too busy to be bothered
> verifying
> their email address and just wondered whether they would be put off by
> having to do this.

Yes, many, including me, would. How do I know that the system isn't
harvesting working e-mail addresses for sale to spammers...

> I just wanted to know if anyone had implemented a system like this and
> whether they had found a reduction in legitimate mail they were
> receiving as a consequence.

Spamassassin gets rid of almost all my spam at the server. Install it with
a set of SARE rules (choose how strict you want to be) and it works
excellently. You can also get it to auto-update its rules on a daily
basis, so you can catch new spam features.

I run it as part of the excellent, free, and powerful MailScanner, written
by Julian Field at the University of Southampton and used on very large
e-mail systems worldwide. I use ClamAV, including some ClamAV signatures
that also stop spam. Powerful and amazingly accurate :)

Cheers!

Anthony
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