An interesting idea. Sort of a challenge and response with the onus
on the recipient. But I think this is handled by auto whitelist which
SpamAssassin was one of the first to implement.
Regards,
KAM
I don't think AWL does with the original poster is describing, but
implementation would be trivial in the MTA without spamassassin involved
at all.
If the user expects to receive mail from a limited number of people like
only their relatives (m...@myhome.com) then this actually might make sense
for them, but if they expect to receive email from any random person who
might be a potential customer (sa...@mybusiness.com) then they would
have a problem with this.
I might try this or something like it for my own use. I would simply
tag as [spam] any message whose From:, Reply-To:, or envelope sender
didn't match my whitelist. Then I would populate the whitelist with the
envelope recipient on any message sent by an authenticated user. You
could do the whole thing in the Exim config file without invoking
spamassassin at all. In fact I don't think it would be hard to keep a
separate whitelist file for each user. If I'm going to get a
confirmation email or some such from some random address then I can look
in my spam folder. If I expect to get future emails from the same
sender....I'll just reply to their message. It doesn't matter if it's a
DoNotReply@ address because they'd still be added to the whitelist when
I hit send. The fact that they blackhole or bounce my reply won't
affect anything.
I have worked at ISP's for the past 12 years and I 100% whole heartedly
agree with David Skoll's observations about the general mass of users,
but I think there are still a subset of people who would benefit from
doing it this way.
