comomolo wrote:Spamassassin is IMHO precisely the kind of bloatware
Spamassassin is absolutely not bloatware. It provides a tremendous service to thousands of people. If you're going to accuse it of being bloatware, you'll need to defend your assertion
no one but geeks would like to use. It's a server side solution, thought for administrators and computer geeks, not "for the rest of us".
Where does it say that? Anybody is free to use it. The idea that only geeks would want to reduce the amount of spam they need to deal with is ludicrous. As to its being a server side solution, I'm not running a mail server, yet it's working fine here.
I had it as an option in my hosting package and have disabled it a couple of weeks after I started using it. It's complicated, error prone, _does_ yield false positives (not to mention the many false negatives)
What version were you running? Spam and spamassassin are both constantly morphing. If you want it to be effective, you need to use the latest version. I never claimed it didn't yield false positives or negatives. I will say that it's extremely efficient at mininimizing both. They calibrate the scores for each release to do just that, so there's quantitative evidence to prove this. Perhaps you were using an outdated version?
and I simply don't want it to manage my mail, because I CAN'T UNDERSTAND ITS MANY TWEAKS, and I DON'T WANT TO LEARN THEM
You don't need to tweak it to use it. My only tweak? The use of a whitelist; anybody that can use a computer can stick email addresses in a text file.
What I want to see and can't find is a software that would reply to an unknown sender the classic blurry image of a word only readable by humans. If the "human" who sent me his/her message replies properly they'll be included in my whitelist and never asked again (this process should be automated and, essentially, it would be the core of the software I'm talking about). This should run at server level (the whole point is avoiding the download of tons of garbage) and -here comes my suggestion- have an interface through the mail client, in this case, Thunderbird, or if it's so difficult (I'm not a developer) through a web interface. The whitelist would reside in the server but managed through the client. Easy and clean.
Such software already exists. It's not what the original poster of this thread is talking about though, so I suggest you start a new thread if you'd like to discuss it.
My mailbox isn't a public place.
Fine, but that's only going to be true as long as you don't publicly post it in the future.
You can write me, but only if I like you you can keep writing me. I can't see how this hurts "innocent people". All antispam solutions I've seen so far -including Spamassassin- force me to download spam messages from my server in order to check if the spam filtering has been done right. As long as this isn't changed in the anti-spam tools designers' minds, so called "anti spam solutions" are simplistic (albeit very complicated algorithm wise) patches to a serious problem: megabytes downloaded for nothing and time spent checking the work done by the anti spam filter.
I just want to verify who's trying to write me, and since most spam is machine originated and reply addresses used by them are fake I would never see the spam messages and not a single human being would be prevented from reaching my mailbox (as long as he/she can identify a few letters inside a blurry image...). Everybody is aware about the spam problem. Nobody will feel insulted if you explain clearly why authorization to write you is needed.
Your idea is riddled with problems. Please start a different thread so we don't sully this one.
Besides, if you believe YOUR mailbox is a public place, you can always keep using Spamassassin and other inelegant solutions like it...
If I didn't want my email address to be public, it wouldn't appear in public. And you haven't successfully explained how Spamassassin is inelegant.
