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Spam and whitelists

I'm way too obsessed with spam. I've been playing with an auto-whitelist setup for my email: mail from any address that I've seen before (to, from, cc, whatever) is automatically accepted and put in my inbox. All other email gets sent through a spam filter. The filter-approved mail goes to a "greybox." The rest gets put into a spam folder that I never check.

So I check my inbox mail on my treo and never see spam. The greybox I can check once a week. Any mail that lands in the greybox and I later file gets automatically added to the whitelist. I don't have to worry about mail from people I know being tagged as spam because the senders are all in my whitelist. All is well, right?

Unfortunately, no. People change email addresses a lot more than I would have thought. If someone switches from yahoo to gmail, they're off the whitelist and suddenly my spam filter (which I've configured to be as paranoid as HAL 9000) gets to decide whether I see it. Uh oh.

So if I haven't yet responded to your email, well, now you know why. Sorry...