Challenge-and-response spam filters

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Tim Green
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Challenge-and-response spam filters

Unread post by Tim Green »

Recently there has been an increase in the number of people using "challenge-and-response" spam filter programs. When you receive a mail from someone not on your "white list" these programs send a mail to the sender asking them to click on a link to confirm that they are a real person and not a spammer.

The H&M Forums registration system does NOT support these programs and we will NEVER respond to challenge mails sent out by these programs. So if you don't manually configure your spam filter to receive mails from the forum's standard email address you won't receive the mails.

Why we don't support C&R spam filters:

This is not something that we haven't got around to supporting. There are strong reasons why these programs are a very bad idea, and this is why we do not support them and will never respond to their mails:
  • Whilst these programs are effective at filtering out spam for the user they greatly and unnecessarily increase Internet traffic. Internet providers' mail servers already have to devote over 50% of their capacity to handling spam. When you use a C&R spam filter every spam mail you receive generates at least one additional mail, further clogging up the Internet system.
  • The system is wide open to abuse. When you receive a challenge mail from these programs there is no quick way you can check that the mail is genuine. It could just as well be from a spammer trying to confirm your email address or someone trying to get you to click on a link to install viruses, spyware or other malware on your computer. If people get into the habit of using these programs it is only a matter of time before fake challenge mails start installing viruses. I would personally never respond to one of these mails or click on a link in them, and I certainly will never set up the forum registration system to do it automatically.
  • Having a white list of approved email correspondents is a good idea. But populating that list with challenge-and-response mails is a very bad idea, particularly when the responder is an automated system like a forum or software registration system. You cannot expect these systems to respond automatically to requests like this from proprietary programs that may or may not be genuine. The Internet desperately needs a reliable way to identify the origin of mails but this is not the way to do it.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

Private support:
Please do not email or PM me with private support requests -- post to the forum directly.
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