[H-GEN] Spam, Humbug lists

Greg Black gjb at gbch.net
Mon Apr 26 23:51:21 EDT 2004


On 2004-04-27, Russell Stuart wrote:

> I am positive I am not the first person to think of this.  Someone,
> probably many someone's, have done this, made it work, and packaged the
> result as an open source project.  Anyone know its name?

As has been noted, you're far from the first to think of this.
However, if you were to do it -- and make it work -- then you'd
be the first.

The problem with all these ideas is that they are useless if the
software replies either to an address in the email headers or to
the envelope from address -- unless it is able to establish that
the address is actually the sender of the message.  That's very
difficult for humans to do reliably and, at this stage in the
evolution of AI, impossible for software to do reliably.

Therefore, any such "solution" just makes the overall amount of
crap flying around in SMTP space get ever larger.  The answer
is: just don't do it.

Cheers, Greg (who has wasted many hours on futile designs for
	      such a tool)
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