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Comment by willhackett | Hacker News Reader

I've done this before. It becomes tedious to maintain, but I can imagine myself doing it again in the future to allow me to do what cannot be done in the common clouds (iCloud, G Suite, O365).

I would love a whitelist-only inbox. I'm sick of spam, marketing mail, etc. I'd like one public email address that catches all the garbage. Then, I'd like a private email address that accepts emails from my contacts, and bounces the rest.

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> Then, I'd like a private email address that accepts emails from my contacts, and bounces the rest.

You're doomed. Because at least one of your correspondents is going to upload their contacts to some service, and that service is now aware of you.

I think OP intends that mailbox to be the one that only accepts mail from a whitelist of addresses.

This is really easy to set up using Dovecot Sieve [1]. I set it up the other day to bounce reject messages that had too many swear words as a proof-of-concept for an idea a Facebook friend had about making sure people stay nice in email. The syntax of the server-side filters is a bit strange but there's even a Thunderbird plugin that allows you to edit them from the client.

[1] https://wiki2.dovecot.org/Pigeonhole/Sieve

Bouncing is a bad idea as it can be abused for spam:

1. Fake the origin to actual destination of choice

2. Your server bounces the original message wrapped by the SMTP error report.

3. Actual destination receives error report containing spam content from YOUR server

A proper solution would be to REJECT the message before it is accepted. However, Dovecot Pigenhole doesn't support that (yet).

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