ChoiceMail One, by DigiPortal Software Inc., is one of the most sensitive spam filters I know. It runs on your Windows workstation, sitting between your ISP's email servers and your own mail client, much like a tiny proxy server. ChoiceMail fetches your incoming email from your provider's server and processes it so that your normal email program will see your non-spam messages only.
The fundamental logic ChoiceMail follows is that incoming mail is spam unless specifically welcomed. (This principle of initial denial is more commonly applied to firewall and router configuration. Allowing only necessary traffic is usually safer than fixing leaks on a whack-a-mole basis.) In practice, ChoiceMail will accept messages "from" whitelisted email addresses. You should generate an initial whitelist from your email address book. ChoiceMail will also pre-emptively whitelist every address to which you send mail. Additionally, you can have ChoiceMail apply rules you write yourself.
However, what if you want to get rid of spam while receiving mail from persons you have not whitelisted yet? When you get mail from an unknown address, ChoiceMail can automatically send a confirmation request (a challenge) to the ostensible sender, asking him or her to complete a short form on a web page. If they do, you will be notified, and, based on the reason they have provided, have the option to allow or deny their mail. On the other hand, if the sender is a spammer, they are unlikely to respond, and ChoiceMail will automatically purge the original message after a few days.
Opponents have voiced the opinion that any challenges ChoiceMail may send would constitute spam.
Automatic responses are widely used. Internet standards even require auto-responses to be sent in various situations. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that email addresses are easy to falsify. Make every effort to avoid challenging unrelated third parties.
ChoiceMail makes the following checks before deciding to send a challenge:
These rules are powerful. Use them as extensively as possible, falling back on the challenge-response feature only if none of them matches. Also note that you can disable challenges altogether; if you do, you will instead need to review the list of unknown senders manually.
You cannot expect to email DigiPortal's ChoiceMail support and receive an emailed response.
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