On Mon, 2018-11-26 at 12:38 -0700, Grant Taylor wrote: > I agree with your logic. But I don't know if I want to organically > grow the list based on outgoing email recipients. I think I'd rather > use the contents of address books. (Obviously something needs to get > said address book data from MUAs to the server where it can use it.) > I think that fear is unfounded unless your user population has a fairly high turnover. Mine is static: my database is a mail archive with just myself as user, so has an absolutely stable user base. I use a view to generate the address whitelist by selecting only the addresses that I've sent mail to so, for instance this automatically deselects almost all the addresses in mass mailing I've received. The current stats are:
messages archived: 189997 all addresses: 15936 whitelisted addresses: 10919 I don't normally keep stats on the whitelist sixe but I do watch the other two and have noticed that the whole address list has stayed at around 15,000 entries for several years, which is fairly amazing considering the number of 'mass mailings' I get from friends and around Xmas. IOW, if you build a whitelist containing just the addresses your outgoing mail is addressed to and periodically trim it to retain only addresses that stuff has been sent to in the last 24 months years I predict that your list size will stabilise despite user churn simply because most people's address lists don't change much from year to year. And, of course, mail concerning online purchases is 99% incoming, so the addresses on it will never get into this type of whitelist. Martin > > Other points: > > > > - if each address entry carries the date mail was last sent to it > > you'll have an easy way to purge the list of addresses that nobody > > has corresponded with in, say, the last two years: this 'time to > > live' > > is long enough to deal with annual subscriptions, etc. > > > > - you'll also need a tool for removing spammers that got on because > > a > > user clicked 'send' without reading a message carefully enough to > > see > > that it was spam > > I understand your points. But I think your point's merit depends on > the > organic / automatic growth from outgoing email. Which I'm not > wanting > to do at this time. > > > I've had this sort of system running for about 10 years now, using > > PostgreSQL as the database. By and large this looks after itself > > without > > needing more than sporadic maintenance, usually when PostgreSQL has > > a > > major upgrade every year or two. But then PostgreSQL is designed to > > be > > self maintaining apart from making periodic backups. I do these > > weekly. > > ACK > > I wonder if I could leverage LDAP instead of a (more) traditional > SQL > database. That way the same data set might be used for more than > just > this purpose. It might even be possible to use the LDAP address book > as > the data source for this. }:-) > > I suspect I could just as easily have something dynamically update > the > LDAP address book as I could an SQL database. Granted, the > mechanics > would be different, but it could still be done. > > Thank you for confirming that (something along the lines of) $THIS > is > possible. > > >
