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This *should* be baked, but it does not exist for the general audience as a service. Partly because the majority (but not all!) of the internet service providers offer white listing as a service.
It should be a website where you can upload your addressbook as a whitelist and it checks your pop-mailbox
for e-mail coming from senders not in your whitelist. Those messages are deleted.
That's it. A service that should cost only a few bucks a year.
Most of us can make such a script in a few minutes on their own server (or it is a feature in the mailserver software), but for the rest of us this is no option.
Baked, by the look of it...
http://si20.com/
There's a free option to boot. [DrCurry, Oct 10 2004]
[link]
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Why should this be server-side and not client-side? And anyway, see link. |
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I do it client-side already. For a friend using a modem to check her e-mail. Only checking headers of 2000+ spam messages a week for 2 or 3 messages for her is not worth the trouble she thinks. It takes her many minutes each time, just watching a progress bar seeing Eudora at work while it checks her e-mail against her white-list. Not a solution. |
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I am online most of the time and I offered to let my Eudora client also check her mailbox when I check my e-mail. Sometimes I go off-line for half a day or so (when I close my PowerBook) and when she happens to check her e-mail her 33k6 modem chokes in the mess. Reason for her not to use the medium anymore, rather than to get broadband so she can get rid of unwanted messages more easily. Instead, she lets me call her answering machine and so on. I hate that. |
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Ten years ago she liked e-mail a lot though, not anymore. |
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The service [DrCurry] links to above is a proxy. What [rrr] suggests is not a proxy, it's a remote client or agent. |
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Advantages of the proxy approach:
- everything you see is always current and has been filtered;
- no need for a user/password database.
Advantages of the agent approach:
- it's okay for the agent to be slow or sometimes overloaded;
- value-added services (extensions etc.) of the original server remain available. |
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Do you see this as a permanent service that's going on in the background, or just as a one-time thing that happens in response to someone pushing a button online? |
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The one-time thing could just list the spam and offer you a checkbox to keep it. |
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The hardest part would be setting up the the https environment and keeping the server safe - your username, password, and list of friends would make it an attractive target. |
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A disadvantage of the proxy approach: |
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- it uses up an awful lot of resources |
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The spam is first retrieved from your mailbox and then stored. A waste of bandwith and diskspace. |
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Another advantage of the agent approach for whitelists: |
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With the POP-command to only retrieve the first 10 lines of a header the spam is identified and then deleted immediately, irreversibly. |
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A disadvantage of both approaches is that there are frequent POP-sessions to poll wether there are new messages. This can be overcome by a notification from your mailserver to the agent that there is new mail (with NotifyMail, see link). When using such a construction, everything you see with the agent approach is also current and filtered. |
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