The Shays-Meehan Spam Finance Bill

[Kragen Sitaker]

Gordon Mohr writes:
> A simple approach that could be used much more would be to:
> 
>   - Only accept mail from a "whitelist" of approved addresses
>   - When mail comes in from any other address, bounce it
>     with a reply that explains how a thoughtful person 
>     could (via a subject token or web-page action) can get
>     their next message through
>   - Once something gets through at all, add the source to
>     the whitelist, unless you specifically choose otherwise
> 
> Voila, no spam, but everything you really want to get still
> makes it through. (If you're really paranoid about losing 
> potentially-valid mail, keep copies of all bounced messages
> and occasionally review via a summary interface.)

Dan Bernstein uses this.

The "really paranoid" variant is unfortunately not nearly as useful,
because you still end up reading all the spam.

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
The Internet stock bubble didn't burst on 1999-11-08.  Hurrah!
<URL:http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/bubble.html>
The power didn't go out on 2000-01-01 either.  :)