Trusted-Exclusive Difference?

General discussion re sg.

Trusted-Exclusive Difference?

Postby Nuke » Sat Dec 20, 2014 10:52 am

I must be a bit slow, but having read several times in the FAQs here about the difference between "Trusted" and Exclusive" senders, I still don't get the point.

Assume my Spamgourmet address is "anyword.name@spamgourmet.com" As I understand it, functionally :-

Trusted senders are a pattern of letters such as "@megacorp.com" , "nonspammer@megacorp.com" or "friend@hotmail.com". Anything from a sender with an address that matches or includes that pattern is passed through to me, whether they send it to "john.name@spamgourmet.com" or to "dick.name@spamgourmet.com", and whether either "john" and "dick" have otherwise already reached their quotas or not. Never mind, if I am happily exchanging emails with a trusted sender or friend, why I or they should suddenly want to change my anyword from John to Dick, that is the way the software works.

Am I right so far?

Exclusive senders are like trusted senders (ie using the matching letter pattern idea), but associated only with one of my "anywords". So I may have made them exclusive with "john.name@spamgourmet.com", so they can send as many mails as they like there, but if they start sending to "dick.name@spamgourmet.com" they will reach Dick's limit and then be stopped. Again, never mind why they would suddenly start sending to Dick instead of John, when John was working perfectly well for us.

Am I right so far?

So what is the practical difference or reason for having a difference between these two? The FAQs say something about mailing lists. My idea of a mailing list is that I am in the address book of eg the secretary of a club who sends out periodic newsletters (that I want), or in the address book of a spammer who sends out endless spam (that I don't want). But surely when such a mail arrives at Spangourmet for sorting there is no technical difference between whether it came from someone with a mailing list or was an occasional mail from a friend? Is the concern that the occasional "friend" or club secretary might give/sell that particular Spamgourmet address of mine to a spammer, so if that happens I can restrict what comes through to me to stuff originating from the club secretary or friend by making them an "Exclusive Sender"? If so, couldn't I do that just as well by making them a Trusted Sender rather than an Exclusive one, and letting that address otherwise reach its limit?

Please tell me what I have missed in this.
Nuke
 
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Location: Chepstow, UK

Re: Trusted-Exclusive Difference?

Postby josh » Tue Dec 30, 2014 9:42 pm

Trusted senders were our first attempt at whitelisting - they're account-wide (i.e. applicable to all your disposable email addresses) and they use domain style matching from right to left - putting 'com' as a trusted sender would allow anyone with an email address ending in .com to send you email - probably not what you want. Putting 'example.com' allows anyone at that domain, or any subdomain to send email - eg., someone@example.com would work, and someonelse@something.example.com would work. If you supply an entire email address, the whitelisting will be limited to that address.

But... with trusted senders, putting 'example' probably won't match anything, unless the 'example' becomes a TLD, like com, net, org, name, tv (and whole bunch of other new ones - maybe example is in the list, what do I know?).

Anyway, exclusive senders are the new-ish / improved-a-little attempt - they're address-specific, they use regex style matching (so, for instance, 'example' would indeed match 'example.com'). Also, counter-intuitively (like most of spamgourmet I guess), exclusive senders are matched against both the From: address and also the To: address -- this was sort of a hack to accommodate mailing lists that have different senders but the same addressee.

> so if that happens I can restrict what comes through to me to stuff originating from the club secretary or friend by making them an
> "Exclusive Sender"? If so, couldn't I do that just as well by making them a Trusted Sender rather than an Exclusive one, and letting
> that address otherwise reach its limit?

Yes - in your example there would be no difference, except that the club secretary as a Trusted Sender could also send to your other disposable addresses as well without decrementing.
josh
 
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Re: Trusted-Exclusive Difference?

Postby Nuke » Fri Jan 02, 2015 12:11 pm

Thanks for the explanation. It often helps to know the "history" of how things developed.
Nuke
 
Posts: 21
Joined: Tue May 15, 2012 12:57 pm
Location: Chepstow, UK


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