I'm not confirming
I am getting quite annoyed with how some people decide to limit their spam intake. I don't like spam in my inbox either, this is why I use spamassassin and bayesian filtering in my email client. It works quite well, I rarely see any crap in my inbox. Some people take the other route: make others do the work for them.
Well guess what, when you're asking for an e-mail from a busy website that automates e-mail processing you better either not use a tool that requires a challenge-response from the server or learn how to use it properly (whitelist).
To all those people who allow challenge e-mails to go out as a response to a solicited-automated email, phbbfft. You will just not get the e-mail and not be able to use half the features on the website, too freaking bad. This is no way to fight spam -- it's just a way to annoy others.
Comments
for my personal email box, spamassassin with bayes turned on within a few days, will automatically assume that EVERYTHING that comes in is spam. *sigh*
Posted by: Eric | August 20, 2004 05:14 PM
I also refuse to confirm when I encounter such.
The worst are the guys who misconfigure their C/R system such that mailing lists cause it to send a challenge to the mailing list (!) for every distinct poster of the list (!!!). Yes, I've experienced that.
Essential reading/bookmarks:
Challenge-Response Anti-Spam Systems Considered Harmful ( http://kmself.home.netcom.com/Rants/challenge-response.html )
And since we're at it, on a closely related note:
AntiVirus / Bounce Spam ( http://kmself.home.netcom.com/Rants/avspam.html )
Incidentally, Karsten has a lot more bookmark material on his site — but see for yourself.
Oh, and of course, chromatic's
One Question Certification Tests for E-Mail Filter Authors ( http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/3682 )
Posted by: Aristotle | August 21, 2004 08:23 AM
Ok - whilst I dont disagree with what anyone is saying here, I've spent months playing around with SpamAssassin and various other spam filters, and guess what... none of them come close to filtering out a sensible proportion of the 3000 odd spam messages we get a week.
For a company with 5 people, that's a fairly high level of spam. We've found that, inspite of your comments to the contrary, MOST people are sick enough of spam that they'll comply (assuming they are not automatically whitelisted by our STMP server on the outbound leg of the journey). We also regularly parse the quarantine list looking for "solicited automated emails" - just to keep on Kasias good side ;)
Spam is a sickeningly annoying problem, and unfortunately, unless someone here has a magic wand, it's not going away. I'd suggest that we all stop whining about the various processes in place to try and stop Spam, and instead concentrate on a more elegant solution to kill it dead in its tracks.
Posted by: ant | August 21, 2004 06:46 PM