Slashdot have some news today about a survey from Symantec saying that 80% of the children with e-mail addresses receive inappropriate spam mail. This is something I've been thinking about for a few months, since my children want to "get on-line".

I receive about 10-15 spams a day from people who want parts of me to grow bigger, offer me wonderful oppertunities to get rich, and giving me other even more fantastic offers. Mozilla does a great job of filtering away most of theese, but some pass through (mostly those with only a single link in the mail-body). Some of which I don't want my children to watch.

So I've been thinking of some kind of dual inbox thing to weed out more of the mass-mailers (inspired by SPAM eater by boo_radley):

1. Inbox #1 gets processed with SpamAssassin
2. Scan inbox #1 for mails with senders not in addressbook
3. Send mail with confirmation text to unknown senders.
4. Move mails with known senders and confirmed senders to inbox #2
5. Update addressbook with confirmed sender?
6. Child fetches mail from inbox #2 with Mozilla

The confirmation mail would have a text string "encoded" with FIGlets and a polite text explainig that this is the mailbox of a child and asking the sender to reply to the mail with the FIGlet "decoded" string in the mail body.

I think the spammers will have a hard time to reply to such a mail (since the sender@server.com, abuse@server.com and postmaster@server.com seldom exists).

My questions to you, my fellow monks, are theese: Would you be offended by a confirmation mail? Is this a resonable protection (used together with SpamAssassin and Mozilla)? Have someone done something like this before? In Perl?

Thanks for your time.


/brother t0mas

In reply to OT: Spam protection by t0mas

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