e-mail and control of your privacy - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: PICmonster
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 24, 2013, 09:28:48 pm
content: Yep e-mail, is this a conspiracy by the main e-mail clients, hotmail, yahoo, google etc.What I am going on about is the fact that you should be able to block people you don't wanna to hear from, the idea of a white-list, that is only your contacts placed on your white-list can send you e-mail, all others are rejected.The technology is available to do this indeed there is nothing hard about comparing an e-mail received with a white-list before it is available to be viewed, and if it is not from a sender on your white-list it is deleted.You might say this is dangerous as you could miss and important message about PPI, but that should be up to the user what security level they wish to choose not the e-mail client dictating what they will receive.but it is not a standard feature of the standard e-mail clients, it is simple, they want to be in control of what you ultimately receive? even thought you just junk it you just maybe will see that add for organ enlargement.Is it me or should this be available to all, why is no one asking about this?

author: Bored@Work
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 24, 2013, 09:52:11 pm
content: This has nothing to do with privacy. This is simple email filtering, and even stuff like the dreaded Microsoft Outlook can do white and black listing. You can even white list with free stuff like Thunderbird. Create a message filter listing all acceptable senders.

author: PICmonster
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 24, 2013, 10:04:15 pm
content: Quote from: Bored@Work on January 24, 2013, 09:52:11 pmWell thanks for educating me, white-lists should be however part of the more common e-mail clients but they are not, I was merely asking peoples opinion why they were not there, but ineffective filters are where one has to constantly try to keep updating the filters when senders are constantly twisting and changing their email sender name variability.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 24, 2013, 10:09:01 pm
content: You are reading too much into it.Email system don't do that by default because then Joe Average wouldn't be able to use the system, they'd just complain they don't receive their email.Dave.

author: ve7xen
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 24, 2013, 10:11:54 pm
content: 1) Maintaining such a whitelist is a huge pain in the ass, and normal users would definitely not accept it as a default. Hell they probably wouldn't understand the concept.2) Modern spam filters are fairly effective, making it largely unnecessary.3) Schemes like this have been proposed (some of them better, for example requiring new senders to respond to a link or with a special token in e-mail before being added), but most have implementation issues, not to mention still cause mail delays, confusion, etc.4) If you really think it's worth the maintenance effort, I don't see why you can't do this with the filtering functionality found in most mail services.The more glaring omission is ubiquitous e-mail encryption. Google et. al. have the power to make PGP (or whatever) ubiquitous, then we can turn on mail crypto by default and spam-bin unencrypted mail.

author: Psi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 24, 2013, 10:55:44 pm
content: The best way is to get your own domain with wildcard mail forwarding (so you can have infinite email address).Lets say you got "foo.com" just for an example.When you decide to sign up for facebook you decide on a email address to use, eg facebook@foo.com. Of for twitter you might use twitter@foo.cometc.. The point is to make up a different email for every person/company that you give an address tooYou then setup your email client to receive all main for your domain (*@foo.com)This way, if you start getting spam on an address that you gave out you instantly know who leaked your email address.If spam starts coming in on facebook@foo.com then facebook is to blame. etc.. you can then update facebook to a new email (facebook-alt@foo.com) and blacklist facebook@foo.com.Now, there is one more problem to overcome, which i haven't talked about yet, and that's random stuff being sent to your domain. Spam bots often pick random names and send them to domains. You will get spam on John@foo.com Sam@foo.com ceo@foo.com admin@foo.com etc..So, instead of giving out simple emails like facebook@foo.com, you invent your own easy to remember code system to identify legit email addresses over random stuff.It can be something simple like the number characters added to the end as a number.For example.facebook.8@foo.comtwitter.7@foo.comeevblog.7@foo.comThe point of this is so you can script your mail client to reject any email that doesn't follow this standard.And that's it.- You can give out individual emails easily, encoding them with a number on the end.- There's no white-list to maintain- Any spam can easy be blocked and a new email issued because the spam comes in on a single email address.- Blacklisting a spam email blocks any future spam on that address, forever!- The email server/client can filter out anything that doesn't match the way you code the addresses and delete it automatically.

author: AndyC_772
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2013, 06:44:36 pm
content: I've used this technique (unique addresses given out to each of my contacts) for some time, it works well. As well as being used to block spam, it's also quite interesting to be able to see exactly who sells or transfers their email databases to who. Insurance comparison sites seem particularly bad for letting addresses 'leak'.I figure it's also a useful reminder to any company I deal with that, if they sell on my address, I'll know it was them and I'll be able to act accordingly. I like to hope that it helps them remember that my personal details are not theirs to do with as they please.What I've never understood is why spammers generate random addresses that will never match legitimate ones. I'd understand them trying "sales@foo.com" because it's likely to exist, but "abvdiefj@foo.com" will only ever end up in a catch-all or spam folder. I used to get loads of spam sent to about a dozen of these made up addresses @mydomain before I gave up on catch-all forwarding and started enabling addresses individually.

author: SeanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2013, 07:10:54 pm
content: Greylisting works well in addition to the spam filter, as most spammers will not hold mail for the rety counter to time out, but will go to the next one in the list. Not totally effective, and gives a 5 minute delay on you getting the mail ( right, in most cases not importanty, and not applied to internal mail anyway, just the mail from the wild outside) but can also be used in conjunction with a blacklist to reduce mail volume.Works for me, I only have about a dozen a day that make it into the spam folder. I looked at the server log, it was getting a solid 2mb/s incoming mail for 24/7. Luckily it is not by me, but belongs to my hosting provider. He has a T1 line just for mail, the other fibre line is for internet and VPN, along with a few dozen Diginet ( still used a lot here, as ADSL in many areas will not make it, and Diginet and ISDN will) lines, along with a small modem pool for emergency backup along with serving the few clients who still use dialup ( rural areas with no cellular service) for email.

author: Alana
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2013, 07:23:53 pm
content: Turning off showing remote linked pictures in e-mail works fine against spammers. Each spam email has link that when opened sends encoded reciver's email to spamserver - this confirms that email is valid and has been read at least once.Disabling any remote pictures in emails [feture of thunderbird and seamonkey] makes them think that your email is "dead" and quickly they remove it from spamlists.Worked for me

author: SeanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 25, 2013, 07:44:08 pm
content: Default setting in Evolution as well. Even Outlook can be set to do that via a group policy edit, it should be on by default, but M$ and the tyranny of the default....................