Email client that will only accept mail from people already in your address book

  • Thread starter Thread starter REM
  • Start date Start date
R

REM

(e-mail address removed) wrote:
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Is there an email client that will only accept mail from people
already in your address book?
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I've become accustomed to Thunderbird email. It has a filter
rule: Sender -> Is in my address book

This will do what you want and I'll bet that most email
programs have this ability. This will trash can anyone who
is not listed in your address book, by email address if I'm
not mistaken. It might look at the name also. I dunno.

Thunderbird has a pretty darned good spam engine that learns
as you manually mark spam. In a month or so it will get most
of the spam. It seems spammers employ new techniques as soon
as they learn about the blocking algorithms employed. The
current trend seems to be writing a paragraph or two of
random, but valid words in each copy.

My reason for asking is the following:
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Possible solution to spam
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To avoid spam one option is to only accept mail from people already in
your address book, AOL offers this service I believe and I understand
there are freeware programs that will do the same thing. The snag is
no one can contact you for the first time.
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You could use a freeware program to make an image of your
email address. Spam programs don't catch images listing the
characters. From there, you could ask for an identifying

subject: bubblepuppy

and apply another filter to allow all messages containing
whatever secret password you select.
I cannot off hand see a way of spamming this system, but if anyone has
any thoughts on this I would like to hear from them.
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Unfortunately, some of the greatest minds are working
against us. If there is a buck to be made someone will
figure a way to sneak the junk to you. If you use stopgap
measures, the two filters above and a web graphic listing
your contact address you'll probably be able to master your
inbox though. It's a shame it comes to this.
 
Is there an email client that will only accept mail from people
already in your address book?

My reason for asking is the following:

Possible solution to spam

To avoid spam one option is to only accept mail from people already in
your address book, AOL offers this service I believe and I understand
there are freeware programs that will do the same thing. The snag is
no one can contact you for the first time.

To get round this problem one option would be to have a web page form
as the first point of contact, this form would have only the subject
line and a retur e-mail address field available to the user and would
be directed to a web mail account. The mail address it is being sent
to can be disguised (I use a small Java script for doing this,
doubtless there are other ways available).

To establish contact you hand out the web site address instead of your
e-mail address. The other party goes to the web site and fills in the
form, which is sent to the web mail address. You decide if you wish to
establish communication and if so put their e-mail address into your
address book.

You then e-mail them via their web form to inform them the chanel is
open.

If you start getting lots of junk on the web mail linked from the form
just close that web mail account and open another, as people should
only access this via the form they never need to know what this
address might be.

This could be built in as a service by ISPs, providing each client
with a standard form and the option to open web-mail accounts to
handle the traffic.

I cannot off hand see a way of spamming this system, but if anyone has
any thoughts on this I would like to hear from them.

Regards
 
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