As everyone knows, spam is completely out of control (there is a good article I can recommend in this month's PC World at:
I use some very fine filtering programs at my computer to help manage this mess, but even so, it is a gigantic aggravation. It seems to me that a series of solutions will be necessary, including some government prosecution, but the main line of defense is at the email inbox at the server.
Those of you who work in this field could perhaps explain to me if something like this is even possible:
Why can't ISP's offer to users a control panel for their email account. That control panel would allow me to have two "compartments" to my account - a "favorites" and "everything else". I could configure the favorites to accept every single email that was from certain senders, or, had certain specific subject lines - in either case I would list/edit all that I wanted in this "favorites" section of the contol panel.
For the other compartment - "everything else" - I could set up an "always deny by sender" list, and a "always deny by subject" list. I could add to (or remove from) these filters whenever I wanted.
All of this is done at the server - *not* from my harddrive.
So each new email would first be checked to see if it was a favorite, and if so, it would go straight through to the favorites section of my inbox. If not, it would be checked against both these "deny" lists, and would be deleted if it met any of my conditions. If however it did not meet any of my conditions, then it would go into the "everything else" box.
When I configure my account, I could indicate how much space I wanted allocated to each compartment - let's say 2MB for favorites, and 3MB for everything else. Then when I check my email, all my favorites would be listed first, then all the others thereafter.
If I went away on vacation and the "everything else" box got filled, I might still have plenty room in the favorites box, which is where the most important stuff is anyway. So I wouldn't have to worry about messages that I actually wanted being bounced back just because the inbox was filled (see the article in
I'd gladly pay an extra dollar every month for this kind of flexibility, and I bet a lot of other people would too. Multiply that out by thousands of people and it would probably more than cover the cost of the software that the servers would need to pull this off.
So my question to you server folks is: why isn't something like this being offered by ISP's across the boards? Or is it not possible to control spam in this manner?
I use some very fine filtering programs at my computer to help manage this mess, but even so, it is a gigantic aggravation. It seems to me that a series of solutions will be necessary, including some government prosecution, but the main line of defense is at the email inbox at the server.
Those of you who work in this field could perhaps explain to me if something like this is even possible:
Why can't ISP's offer to users a control panel for their email account. That control panel would allow me to have two "compartments" to my account - a "favorites" and "everything else". I could configure the favorites to accept every single email that was from certain senders, or, had certain specific subject lines - in either case I would list/edit all that I wanted in this "favorites" section of the contol panel.
For the other compartment - "everything else" - I could set up an "always deny by sender" list, and a "always deny by subject" list. I could add to (or remove from) these filters whenever I wanted.
All of this is done at the server - *not* from my harddrive.
So each new email would first be checked to see if it was a favorite, and if so, it would go straight through to the favorites section of my inbox. If not, it would be checked against both these "deny" lists, and would be deleted if it met any of my conditions. If however it did not meet any of my conditions, then it would go into the "everything else" box.
When I configure my account, I could indicate how much space I wanted allocated to each compartment - let's say 2MB for favorites, and 3MB for everything else. Then when I check my email, all my favorites would be listed first, then all the others thereafter.
If I went away on vacation and the "everything else" box got filled, I might still have plenty room in the favorites box, which is where the most important stuff is anyway. So I wouldn't have to worry about messages that I actually wanted being bounced back just because the inbox was filled (see the article in
I'd gladly pay an extra dollar every month for this kind of flexibility, and I bet a lot of other people would too. Multiply that out by thousands of people and it would probably more than cover the cost of the software that the servers would need to pull this off.
So my question to you server folks is: why isn't something like this being offered by ISP's across the boards? Or is it not possible to control spam in this manner?