Today I decided I finally couldn't take it anymore and cleaned my inbox on Klaki.net. This resulted in some surprise e-mails to people who had probably forgotten they'd ever e-mailed me, let alone expected a reply.

It also resulted in me discovering that the newest guy on my team in Dublin sent me e-mail last summer about Anomy related stuff (which I had already replied to, surprisingly enough). That was kinda funny, both of us remembered the exchange, but neither had made the connection, until today.

While cleaning my inbox, I pondered what I could do to make it stay clean(ish). I don't want to just close the accounts feeding it, I quite like being bre@(the universe).

That said, I did shut down a couple addresses which I didn't care about, but they probably won't make much of a dent in the flow of spam...

For the past year or so, I've been telling anyone interested in hearing me rant that I think e-mail is dead, because of spam. It will be replaced with a form of instant-messaging, once IM becomes mature enough. Now this may well be incorrect, but I figured I might as well put my money where my mouth is and try to make my e-mail more like an instant-messaging system.

The main difference, in my opinion, is that IM systems are invite-only. You only talk to people you have invited. E-mail on the other hand, is a free-for-all. Anyone in the world can e-mail you, whether you want them to or not.

So I'd like to make my e-mail invite-only. The first step is to generate a list of people who are already invited to send me e-mail. The second is to make it easy to maintain that list. The third is to figure out how to let people ask to be invited. The fourth is to use the list in an IM-ish way.

For step one, I wrote a shell-script which scans my past year-or-so of saved mail (non-spam) and dumps all the senders e-mail addresses into a list. That amounted to just over 1100 addresses. Lots!

For step two, I made the list update itself once a day with e-mails I've saved that day, and made it update itself with the address of anyone I decided to send e-mail to as well.

To help new people get invited, I've created a form for people who find me through the web and want to send me e-mail. This form is now linked most everywhere I used to have a mailto: link. Messages sent using this form will bypass any filters I later install, so I'll see them. If I then choose to either save or reply to them, the senders will automatically become whitelisted.

I'll probably come up with some other ways for me to notice new people and "invite" them as well, but for now that's what I've got.

For step four, the shell script written in step one also generates rules for procmail, flagging all messages which come from people I know. I haven't decided exactly how I will use these flags, but once I'm relatively sure the system works, I'll probably banish all unflagged mail to a folder which I never look at, aside from possibly a daily or weekly summary of new people I might want to "invite".

Another thing I do, is I now discard all mailer-daemon errors (I get a massive amount of those), unless they mention someone in my whitelist. This dramatically reduces noise in my inbox, while at the same time making it more likely than before that I'll actually notice if an e-mail I send to someone bounces.

This is more or less all unrelated to the previous set of spam filters I had on my incoming mail. Those I will use to help detect forgeries and decide which of the unflagged mail I will bother to check for people I should "invite" to my whitelist.

As an aside, this method may give me some insight into the current rate of false-positives in the AVES anti-spam filters, which I can then tell my friends at FRISK about.

It'll be interesting to see how this pans out. Will my e-mail become usable again, or was this all an exercise in futility?