Spam proof email

I am very proud to announce that overchat.org is now offering spam proof email accounts. I expect you're thinking "yeah, right", well you're right to be cynical. There are probably lots of people making similar claims. So what's the catch? The catch is that we are operating a true whitelist. You must copy your address book to the server and anybody whose email address is not in your address book cannot email you. I truely believe that we must all start doing this. Spam is not going anywhere! Legislation has failed. Technical efforts have failed. Whitelisting is the last resort. It is a necessary evil, to put the first nail in the coffins of the spammers.

  The scale of the problem

Unsolicited commercial email, supposedly selling Viagra/Cialis and other various sexual enhancements, stocks, herbal weight-loss, get rich quick schemes and Nigerian 419 scams now account for 90% of all email traffic. My grandmother said "can't you just delete them?", this grossly under-estimates the situation. Email servers are now struggling under the load. Month after month the amount of spam increases as spammers attempt to flood us with even more to get around various filters. There are now so many filters and tasks going on in the chain of email that some people find their mail doesn't even arrive for 24 hours or more! Yet still, junk arrives in your inbox because the spammers are graphics which cannot be read by OCR and adding sections from random books or documents to confuse the filters. Time to say enough is enough! Take the brave step and take one of our spam-proof email addresses.

  The next stage in the war

Whitelisting is not the only answer but it is part of the solution. Once we have switched to using whitelisting, spammers will then try to assume that most of us have joe @ [some large bank or company ] on our mailing lists. A fair assumption. I encourage you not to add large domains to your whitelist unless you know somebody specific at that company. If you add bill.gates @microsoft.com to your white- list, you will be abused by spammers.

  How to sign up

I am happy to let the first fifty people or so have free sign-ups and tell their friends about the service, however, after that, I will be asking for a ten pound GDP donation to the OverChat project to aid it's development. This will buy your email hosting for two years. You can have up to 1 GB of space on the server, bandwidth subject to reasonable limits. You can email me at palmer@overchat.org. You must include 3128 somewhere in the subject to override my whitelist, otherwise I won't receive the email.

  Manually setting up whitelisting

If you have an account on core1.daybologic.com and don't have a whitelisting system set up. Please use the following code in your .mailfilter file, you will need to edit this with nano or a compatible editor:

xfilter "/usr/local/bin/dlwlfilter"
if ( /^X-DayboLogicWhiteList: false/ )

to "! devnull"


Then create a directory called .mailfilters/
In this directory, create key.txt and whitelist.txt whitelist.txt is a line-by-line list of email addresses allowed to send you email, key.txt is a single line containing the email subject people can send you to override the whitelist. Make sure all of the above files have mode 600 and all the directory .mailfilters/ has the mode 700. You can change this with the chmod command.