1 post tagged “email”

It's a new year, I've got a new empty inbox, and I'm turning up the sensitivity dial on the spam filter.

Email, for me, falls into three broad categories - lists I've subscribed to, mail from people I know, mail from strangers.  

Lists can be identified by checking the "List-Id" header.  "People I know" is determined by checking the mail against the contents of my addressbook.  Whitelisting.  (Which is fine - until someone uses a new email address, then they drift back into the stranger category.)

"Strangers" consists of 99.5% spammers, and that's where the filtering effort is spent - extracting the 0.5% of wheat from the chaff.  Spam filters aren't perfect, but you either end up trusting your settings or commit yourself to visually scanning through low-scoring spam.  Not as bad as drinking from the full fire-hose, but still a stupid email admin task I end up putting off.  For days.  For weeks.  Sorry about the delay.

One solution to this is to implement challenge-response systems, or to require some sort of password be included in the mail.  Personally I never jump through the challenge-response hoops.  I've decided to implement something similar to the password.

If you want to bypass my spam filter, include a vCard attachment containing (at least) your first name, last name, and email address.

I've set up a filter that checks for mails containing MIME attachments of the type "text/directory" (or "text/x-vcard") and copies them into a directory where they can be easily checked and whitelisted with a single click.  Anyone I've mailed in the last couple of years is already in the whitelist.

Of course this only speeds up my reading of mail - speeding up my replies is a different problem...