I don't have the experience at running large mail servers that some of you have; but I would like to comment on RMX. I've been seeing various new user-space programs popping up which do similar things. They seem to work by the user keeping a database of acceptable mail senders. The user dosn't need to do anything except download their mail with this program. If the program finds the sender in the database, it accepts the mail. If it dosn't, it sends the sender a "confirmation request" with some unique id number. If they reply, they get added to the user's database. Thats the general operation. It seems that most well-managed maillists use this technique to filter out spam.

So I'm expecting more popmail programs will start using this type of feature. It would be nice if there was a standard, so that the sender's mail program will recognize a "confirmation request" automatically and auto-send the confirmation, if it's valid. I'm sure there are alot of ways to hack and abuse this, but it has the potential of being a "pretty tight ship" and runs in user space independent of the ISP's.

In reply to Re: (OT) Fighting spam by zentara
in thread (OT) Fighting spam by Aristotle

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