E-mail lists choke on spam

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Email USERS should and can be in control!

In the story: "Subscribers have little or no way to tell that their mail is not getting through..."

Most email administrators don't let the users decide what they want and what they don't want to receive.

But not all. Look at the spam control system at email provider FastMail.FM (http://fastmail.fm):

Email is scanned by SpamAssasin, but is not blocked. Header fields are added to the email which is then ready to be delivered to the user. Then the email is filtered using the user supplied rules, that can access all the info that was recorded in the headers. A user can use the default rules as they come with a new account. Or use choose from one of several spam filtering "levels". Up till here it's the same as most email services. The next level of user control is that a user can specify different levels for several filtering actions: for totally discarding messages. For filing in the Junk mail folder. For marking the subject line as spam (with the spamAssassin assigned "spamscore".)
The next level of user control is altering those actions, such as specifying how Subject lines are marked. We're not finished. The user can decide tnot to use this system, but instead write her own rules, using a very rich rule entry system, that has access to the information recorded by spamassassin in the headers. This can be used, for example, to set different filtering levels for email arriving at different addresses (using email forwarding, pop-links, email aliases, whitelisting etc.) Finally, all this is implemented using the Sieve filtering language, whare the system generates a Sieve script for each user from the combination of the user's spam control choices and the user's created rules. The user can can choose to create a custom script for herself, instead of the one generated by the system (or even better: first have the system generate a script, and then edit it further to get even finer control than what the system gives.) And one thing I didn't mention above: address book whitelisting, also done by marking the email headers so either system generated script or user customized script can do it in many ways.

My point is: Users can be given the choice to control their own email. There are existing tools that can let users have as much and as little control as they wish, and there is no justification for administrators to block anything but email sources such as open relays or proxies that send only spam but can be sources of DOS attacks, and nothing more!

Posted by: hadaso   Posted on: 04/14/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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