Re: list

[Herman Van Uytven <]

I have been thinking about the "whitelist" principle for a while,
but I don't believe it can work now, because what would happen
when one person with a whitelist wants to mail to another
person with a whitelist ?  The first person must add the
second person in his whitelist.  Although this is possible,
I don't think you can expect this from 'normal' users: they
will forget it.  It would be possible if your whitelist could
be updated automatically when you send mail, but I do not think
there is any mail reader around which can do this at this moment.
With mailing lists it would be even more complex, since your
first mail goes to majordomo or listserv, and you receive mail from
the list address.
A similar solution would be that everyone uses digitally signed
E-mail, and that you refuse unsigned mail (and mail from bad CA's).

Does anybody know there are any initiatives in one of these
directions ?

-Herman-
>At home, I've been experimenting with a "whitelist": mail sent to my
>published email addresses will have the sender checked against a
>"whitelist" and if it doesn't match it will be bounced with
>instructions on how to get on the whitelist (which are supposed to
>require a human to interpret them).  There's another address which is
>guaranteed to be delivered to me, bypassing the whitelist, but I only
>tell my friends that one; I don't post to Usenet with it, for example.
>
>The disadvantage is that this makes it much more work for someone to
>email me, and I have to remember to set the From: line in my headers
>to the the public or private address depending on how public the email
>is.
>
>(At the moment the software shouldn't bounce anything; it just tells
>me what it would do.  I'm still building up the whitelist to include
>friends who email me only rarely, mailing lists, etc.  It's currently
>quite liberal, e.g. allowing all of ac.uk through..)
>
>ttfn/rjk