"Harold" == Harold Paulson <haroldp@sierraweb.com> writes:
Harold> The problem is that we are making net.messes by
Harold> automatically replying to junk. It would be nice to see a
Harold> general fix.Well, there isn't one.[1] Take the case in point. Your solution is also a hack in that it depends on having an explicit whitelist.
Of course it's an excellent hack! It works in a *lot* of cases of interest to MLM admins, but in principle you don't want to keep whitelists (well, my Mom can spam me :-) or blacklists. It's content that you want to filter on (or out).
Footnotes: [1] Well, you could have a "bonded mail" solution: every message arrives with a PayPal credit, and the reader either waives it or the sender pays. My sister gets a permanent waiver, the taxman and the "performance enhancement" salesmen can pay up. ;-) Problem is, that's too easy to corrupt into a Goodmail solution where the ISP collects the gelt. There's also Hashcash, but that's not a terribly happy solution for mailing lists.
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