Spam Challenge
<1 min read
[@701]
Spam Challenge
Cédric is testing a simple challenge/response anti-spam method. Great! A simple system like that is definitely needed.
The problem with Cédric's approach (and other challenge/response systems) is that they still leave a few problems unsolved.
Requiring people to respond to the challenge is fine if they are the ones emailing you. There should be no challenge if someone is responding to an email you sent them. This is not an easy problem to fix because everything happens on the email client side.
Spam Challenge
Cédric is testing a simple challenge/response anti-spam method. Great! A simple system like that is definitely needed.
The problem with Cédric's approach (and other challenge/response systems) is that they still leave a few problems unsolved.
Requiring people to respond to the challenge is fine if they are the ones emailing you. There should be no challenge if someone is responding to an email you sent them. This is not an easy problem to fix because everything happens on the email client side.
[@911]As Cédric mentioned, a whitelist is required to ensure that certain addresses or domains are never filtered. Spammer have gotten a lot smarter in the last few months. The sender's email address is often a valid address from the same domain as the recipient. How do you fight this? I get a lot of spam pretending to be from my wife @ thauvin.net, and I'm not about to bounce all mail coming from her. Company mail is even worse.
Steve is telling me that ASK addresses this issue by embedding a key in all outgoing messages. Although it did not work for me. Apparently Steve's key is his signature, which Thunderbird automatically removed when replying.