Please note: Until your email address is validated, your email is NOT viewed
by any human and will not be read.
I’m currentlty getting a bit of backscatter – a lot of bounces – and also quite a few of these challenge/response messages.
I am especially tired of those challenge/response sender verification thingies and I so often considering actually responding just to annoy the implementers of such systems.
But … what do you do ?
Train them as spam? Or as you suggest reply and say how broken they are.
I do the former these days; but in the past I had a stock mail to send to users of those systems ..
My free mail provider (tlen.pl or o2.pl) is known worldwide for sending tons of spam. I usually get through somehow where it isn’t blacklisted. I totally ignore such “registration requests”. Last year I posted a lengthy rant about it on linux-thinkpad mailing list, as some half-wit registered to the list with an account sporting this kind of “protection” and it responded to the list with the registration request.
If your email provider doesn’t accept my mail, then I won’t help you. Bad luck, but I couldn’t care less.
It depends who’s contacting whom; if someone has emailed me asking for help, then they simply don’t get a response.
So far, I think it’s always been that way around; if I wanted to contact somebody who used one of those systems, I’d think hard about how important it was for me to contact them. If I did, I’d add a note about how stupid these systems are.
what i did was write a procmail rule that runs a script to extract the verification URL from the Challenge/Response message and automatically “verify” every message regardless of whether it was sent from me or not.
i figure that anyone who spams me with CR crap *deserves* to get their spam – after all, they’re trying to offload the hassle of THEIR spam onto ME.
Challenge/Response systems are stupid. and broken. and spam innocent third parties whose email addresses have already been hijacked by other spammers.
I have procmail send them to /dev/null. Out of sight, out of mind as they say.
Yes, definitely respond and confirm you want the spam message to get through to the recipient. It’s important to train the users of these challenge-response systems that they’re *not* addressing the right problem.
I always respond to C-R when it is from spam. I never respond to C-R when it is from my own mail.
I tend to agree with bobhatescrspam. I’ve never had enough backscatter to make it worthwhile to automate this, and not automating this allows me to not confirm requests about not-so-important mails from me.
I visit the said website and ensure the mail gets delivered. If they think they can waste my time, it is fair return.
I couldn’t agree more with what most other people have said here. Challenge-Response is broken, offensive (yes, I am human!), and silly. And if you’re not careful, it can cause mail loops, too.