I am sitting here using my Earthlink Spamblocker feature — which is a whitelist. I am manually adding in domains for companies that I will accept mail from. That is annoying. Why isn’t there a way to instantly add in lists of companies and others that I want to whitelist? For example, I would like to be able to just whitelist “all venture capital firms” and “all members of W3C” etc… Why doesn’t someone make a system for instantly whitelisting sets of domains and/or addresses for specific interests?
Social tagging: Things I Want
Sounds like a perfect application of a trusted network. I could see people creating a shareable, reusable list of “domains of trusted companies” – ideally sortable and selectable via a variety of categories, and selective enough to differntiate between a “yahoo.com” address and a yahoo corporate address (which uses a different domain).
I wonder if blogroll type systems could be modified to support this – could such a white list be “subscribed” to in a blogroll like fashion? Or perhaps adopted from other spam fighting techniques, instead of a blackhole list, build up a “accepted list”?
Could such a list be an outgrowth of something like the Open Directory Project? i.e. add to the directory project “valid email domain(s)” for each company within a category, add a functionality for a group to report “bad behavior and/or invalid/changed domains” and use that on a subscription basis?
Shannon
Good ideas, Shannon
A recent project of mine, Filster, taps into Orkut to find the whitelist data. The only reason I haven’t extended it to cover the other social networking services is lack of motivation — my email works fine without advanced filtering, thanks to the confluence of approximately four different mail providers applying separate filters to my email.
If you’re seriously interested in a tool that taps your social network as a whitelist, let me know by email; I could always do more work on it 🙂
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