use Perl

• Never mind email or spam (Score:1)

  by brianiac (4158)

  I've often thought that we should start over to get rid of ridiculous cruft (ancient browsers, content in nonstandard markup, IP4), and mismanagement/plutocracy in the DNS system. Why bother with top-level domains anymore? Skippers.net [skippers.net]?!? *sigh*
• Whitelists Aren't The Complete Answer (Score:2, Insightful)

  by chromatic (983)

  Suppose I need to send an e-mail to a couple of hundred OSCON speakers or to a few thousand newsletter subscribers. I don't have time to deal with each individual whitelist request. If I automated it, though, what's to stop a spammer from doing the same?

  The same goes for every micropayment system I've heard proposed in conjunction with e-mail. A lot of these proposals work fine if you only ever talk to a handful of people. There are quite a few people like me who have genuine business reasons to talk
  • Re:Whitelists Aren't The Complete Answer (Score:1)

    by rob_au (1845)

    There is a good paper discussing different guarded email systems online at http://www.dwheeler.com/guarded-email/guarded-email.html [dwheeler.com].
    • Re:Whitelists Aren't The Complete Answer (Score:1)

      by inkdroid (3294)

      From here [bluebottle.com]:

      "If you're sending an email, Bluebottle automatically adds the recipient's address to your allowed list to avoid a request being sent when they reply."

      So chromatic would automatically whitelist his recipients when he sent the email. That's actually pretty cool.
• Practical implementation (Score:1)

  by rob_au (1845)

  One open-source project which I am currently involved with is the OpenBottle verification system, http://www.openbottle.net [openbottle.net] - This is a practical implementation of email whitelists and can be seen in implementation on the company web page at http://www.bluebottle.com [bluebottle.com]. My involvement with the OpenBottle verification system is from the perspective of the company providing this system, Bluebottle Pty Ltd, and am currently involved in code review, documentation and development for the commercial version and ne
• Castration (Score:2)

  by pudge (1)

  Never underestimate the power of threat of castration to stop people from doing bad things.
  
  Seriously, if we made laws, worked with other nations on them, and enforced them, we would go a long way to decreasing spam.
  • laws.. (Score:2)

    by htoug (771)

    We have a law that forbids spam here in Denmark, it is a part of a EU legislation AFAIK. I have notified the local 'folkeregister' (the office where they keep tabs on you, your whereabouts, why you are married to etc) that I do not want any unsolicited mails, either normal, e- or by phone. There is a fairly stiff penalty for breaking the law - I complained to a local bank who (due to an error in their filtering programmes) sent me an ad for their fine new something-or-other, and they excused profusely and s