Most of this documentation is based on the pioneering work of Emory Lundberg.

The first thing you should do is browse the information available at the TMDA Website.

Do you receive a lot of spam at your Rupture account? Do you hate it? Now you can take back control of your mailbox. Use TMDA.

TMDA's guiding principle is to 'blacklist' EVERYONE unless they are specifically 'whitelisted.' It forces people to confirm email messages they send to you unless they are on a special 'whitelist' that you specifically create and manage. When they send you email, TMDA sends them a confirmation request. Once they respond to this request and confirm their original email, they are put onto your whitelist (so they don't need to confirm their messages in the future) and their message is delivered to you. While their message is unconfirmed, it waits in a special queue (not your mailbox!) That means that you don't see spam.

This prevents spam from reaching you because spammers typically send email in such a way that you can't reach them. They use bogus addresses, so they don't receive the confirmation request. They don't read these requests when the addresses aren't bogus. That would require time and money. And they don't act on your responses when they do read them. Spammers are lazy and stupid. They want to reach as many people as possible by investing as little time, money, and effort as possible. They don't see things like TMDA's confirmation request, let alone confirm it. That would be suicide for them, since they would be admitting that they are real people who can be easily traced.

On the other hand, real people are reasonable. If a normal person that you don't know emails you out of the blue (perhaps in response to something that you posted on your website, or because you met him at the pub and gave him your email address) and receives a notice that he needs to confirm his email so he won't be considered a spammer, he will generally do it.

TMDA also allows you to generate email addresses to use for things like website memberships, shopping sites like amazon, and the like. This means they can always email you since they're a keyed address. But if you find that someone is spamming you THROUGH an address you've given to someone like, say, Godiva or Amazon, you'll not only KNOW who gave your address up (!!!) but you'll also be able to REVOKE the address you CREATED YOURSELF for that site.

You can also send DATED messages to people - i.e. the address an email address is from is valid for x days. This is good for mailing lists and such because someone can write to the above From: address for a few days but then it won't work anymore.

If you got this far and would like to set up TMDA to filter your email, read the setup document.