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racist term blacklist vs whitelist

Posted: Thu Oct 08, 2020 3:44 pm
by kchsieh
it is 2020, can we change the racist term 'blacklist' and 'whitelist' in the email spam filter feature?

Re: racist term blacklist vs whitelist

Posted: Fri Oct 09, 2020 9:58 am
by jerrielm
kchsieh wrote:it is 2020, can we change the racist term 'blacklist' and 'whitelist' in the email spam filter feature?
Hello!

Thank you for the time you have taken to visit our forums. I can definitely see why these terms could be considered racist. Being a Black male I do understand where you are coming from. The terminology of these words do not have any racial meanings behind them. They are simply list that allow emails to go though or not to go though. We will possibly look into changing this in the future so that we can get terms that are easier to understand.

Again I do thank you for bringing this up as there are people that could see these terms as racist. As always Sonic is always making sure that their company is reflected positively and that we understand and support our community.

If you wish to talk about this more feel free to PM me or reply here.

Best Wishes

Re: racist term blacklist vs whitelist

Posted: Fri Oct 09, 2020 6:05 pm
by jondrea
For what it's worth, where I work we've substituted "block list" and "allow list". The change didn't offend or confuse anyone. :)

Re: racist term blacklist vs whitelist

Posted: Mon Oct 26, 2020 10:47 am
by kgc
Please note that our local terminology for these options is inherited from the upstream SpamAssassin project. I'll review to see if there's an opportunity for us to alter the language in our tools without generating confusion. This would not, however extend into the core of the application itself or name of the rules and so on.

https://spamassassin.apache.org/doc.html