On 06/10/06, Chris O'Halloran cmoman@gmail.com wrote:

Clear have advised that spam from known spam addresses will be blocked and that other messages will be quaranteened for only 3 days after which the messages will be deleted.

Good that you use a gmail address then :-)

Personally, clear.net's policy sucks. If some scum uses my address to spam millions of customers, I wouldn't want my legitimate e-mail blocked too.

As I am not a systems administrator I was wondering what the usual policy for encrypted email (eg GPG) in regard to spam filtering. Is encrypting an email a guarenteed way for people to communicate and avoid messages being deleted by aggressive ISP spam policies. I assume spammers wouldn't bother encrypting email because receiver's couldn't decrypt the emails.

Thoughts?

Most spam filters work by 'scoring' an e-mail for the likelihood of spam. If it goes over a certain score, then it is marked as spam. It is most likely that encrypted e-mail would not score highly, unless part of the spam filter's scoring table specifically marks encrypted e-mail (which is probably not like). Since the encrypted e-mail won't contain strings that trigger off the spam filter, it is unlikely to be marked as spam.

HTH

-- simon