OT White lists and email

Here is a workable idea, if I could just convince Gmail to try it. When you sign up for an email address you can have the option of using a permission only email address. You always have the option of using your regular email address snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com that passes everything, but Gmail also gives you an address like snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com

Anything going to snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com (spamblock) would be blocked. The contacts you have for snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com are automatically passed to the permission only address. Any email you send from either address will be white listed and passed to the permission only address.

You can also have Gmail store passwords so that any emails that have the password in the subject and/or body will pass. You can use more than one password that can be permanent or expire.

Hint. Your first name or nickname would be a good permanent password that you could give to your friends and put on business cards.

You could even post your permission only address on Usenet with a password that expired every month.

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com put crazyhead in the subject for permission to email me.

Reply to
Metspitzer
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My isp, Internet Nebraska, uses a challenge system called MailAgent. It automatically sends an email to unknown senders asking for a response. It lets messages through to my account if the sender replies. I can also deny or allow permission to certain senders. INebraska also uses something called Postini. I don't know anything about that.

Reply to
Dean Hoffman

Google makes most of it's money selling your info to spammers. Why would they want to limit that?

Reply to
gfretwell

I don't think that is true. They use/sell your search results, but not your personal information.

Reply to
Metspitzer

The way to find out would be to start a G mail account and never actually use it. Just be logged into Google when you are searching and see what spam it collects.

Reply to
gfretwell

I agree. I have a second one. I opened the account several months ago because I wanted to use two versions of Google Reader without having to log off of one to use the other.

The in box has two messages. Both are from Google + One is July 13 and the other is July 27. I tried using Google + with that account once. That is most likely why the two emails are there.

Reply to
Metspitzer

Dean Hoffman wrote in news:jvkl59$o4t$1 @speranza.aioe.org:

Postini is an anti-spam service run by Google that they sell to ISPs. It is fully customizable and works very well in stopping spam and viruses.

Once a day at 11:00pm, users receive an automated Quarantine email from their ISP that lists the messages that were trapped during the past 24- hours. If you decide you want one of the trapped messages delivered anyway, you click on a "Deliver" button in the email, and that message will be sent to you. The "Deliver button doesn't work very reliably, though. Often you need to log on to the Postini site (link provided in the Quarantine message), and do your "Deliver" from there.

The downside of the 24-hour Quarantine system is that occasionally legitimate emails will get trapped, and you won't know about it until

11:00pm that night, which can be a problem when working with business emails. Virus traps are reported to you immediately.

Postini is a good thing.

Reply to
Tegger

Been there. Done that. I have several Gmail accounts. Those that have never been used, or used only for trusted purposes, have never received spam even after several years of existence.

The same is equally true of both Hotmail and Yahoo mail.

These email account providers know how trivial it would be to detect their making your email address accessible to a spammer and if their perfidy could be demonstrated, they would be ostracized.

Reply to
HeyBub

They've installed a similar system at work. I don't know what the algorithm is but in addition to just having the trapped emails sent, one has the option of whitelisting those senders. I don't know if they bought it from Google but it really does work well (no problems with the "deliver" button, either).

At my PPoE they had a similar setup but there was no daily message with the list of trapped messages. Weeks could go by before I checked the trash folder for important emails. This really didn't work so well.

Reply to
krw

" snipped-for-privacy@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Postini has that, too. You can blacklist/whitelist entire domains, or individual addresses. Some domains (Hotmail, for one) that are notorious for spam are blacklisted by default, and each address needs to be whitelisted indivudually.

Next time you get a Quarantine report, mouse-over the Deliver button and see if the reported URL contains the string "postini".

I don't know how much customization each ISP does to its Postini system. It's possible that each ISP's implementation of Postini is slightly different (mine might be the only one that automatically blacklists Hotmail, for instance).

You can knock Google for certain things, but overall they do a pretty good job of what they do.

Reply to
Tegger

When you say "blacklisted" you mean trapped by "Postini" by default. ...and "whitelisted" bypass Postini? With the work system, I'm sure there are some sites that are so black that they don't even show up in the report. They have the systems locked down so tight it's hard to get anything done.

I'll try to remember do that in the morning. I don't recall any URLs reported, though (it's an OutHouse email system).

This is a corporate system, not an ISP but I suppose there isn't a lot of difference.

Yes, unfortunately, they do *too* good of a job at some things they do. I don't use anything Google, if I can reasonably avoid it. SketchUp is one where I kick myself but just gotta do it anyway. ;-) "Do no harm", my ass.

Reply to
krw

Except that spammers take names they have in one domain, and spray them across others -- so if snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com is on a spam list, it's pretty much guaranteed that snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com will be tried blindly also. You'd have to set up a gmail account with a name so unique it couldn't be in use elsewhere for this experiment to be somewhat valid.

Josh

Reply to
Josh

" snipped-for-privacy@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Yes.

Might be part of the customization. My wife's bank has their systems locked down very tightly indeed. Not only are some sites and servers totally invisible, but the workstations are so tightly shut that you can't even change the desktop wallpaper or the printer options.

Then it's probably Microsoft Exchange, a very popular enterprise-level messaging system. Exchange strips TCP/IP information from messages and stores it in separate files.

It may well be Postini. Postini appears to be usable with Exchange.

I use 3DS Max in my job, so SketchUp isn't really useful for me. I did download it and try it out, though. For a free program, it's not bad at all.

Reply to
Tegger

It is Exchange.

Yep. It is Postini.

One of the guys here output our board data and sucked it into SketchUp to get a 3D view of the circuit board. It was pretty slick but something that could be done far better by a better CAD system.

I just use SketchUp for woodworking stuff. Zero cost is important. ;-)

Reply to
krw

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