Graham's spam filter

[Skip Montanaro]

    >> http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/evil.html

    >> evil (adj.) As used by hackers, implies that some system, program,
    >> person, or institution is sufficiently maldesigned as to be not worth
    >> the bother of dealing with....

    Mark> Thanks.  What I was looking for was some elaboration on why he
    Mark> said the whitelist technique was evil.

That fit my operational definition of whitelist maintenance pretty well.
I've tried it.  It frequently doesn't work, certainly not well enough to be
worth the bother for me most of the time.  It doesn't scale if you have a
large number of legitimate correspondents with whom you rarely exchange mail
or who you don't know ahead of time.  For instance, if you are the webmaster
of some site, you're going to a) get a lot of spam and b) be unable to
whitelist legitimate senders because you don't know who they are.

Skip