Reading through Scot Finnies Newsletter – aimed at the techie or techie wannabe with broadband he was touching on two things I’m interested in. Agnitum’s Outpost Firewall and blacklists on spamming. The first is about to launch a beta version 2 which sounds really good. This is the firewall I am running on my home pc and my parents in-laws. Its much better and more configurable than ZoneAlarm, is free and gives you more protection from things like webbugs in your email. He also talks about blacklists and how they are evil. I agree with him and I think the only way to stop spam and give yourself control is either for isps to implement blacklists but at the same time divert spam into a special mailbox for each user so they can decide whether it *is* spam or not and then have the option to whitelist the mail for themselves or even better is to have the decent ability to do this in their email client. It will be brilliant the day that outlook express etc has decent mail filtering built in. I do like the idea of Cloudmarks spamnet, but from my experience it just does not catch enough spam. Also, a lot of newsletters get blacklisted which loses readers. Whitelisting (which overrides the central blacklist filter) works, but defeats the object as this means “your vote” (which is how cloudmark works) never gets counted. They should make the software act so that a “whitelist” option makes the email rank more highly in the “not spam” category.
Scots Newsletter | Cloudmarks Spamnet | Agnitum’s Outpost