Spam Arrest?

[theworm[$]]

Anyone ever heard of it or used it?

I got an e-mail at work from an Ebay buyer. When I responded, I got a message from Spam Arrest saying that I had to click to be accepted. I was a bit nervous about that, but it seemed legit and the computer hasn't erased its drives yet.

Anyway - here's the Spam Arrest website.

Does anyone have experience with it?

[theeye]

Challenge/response systems are getting to be more and more common. Normally, they present you with a distorted graphic of an alphanumeric string which you have to type in to 'prove' that you're a human and not a 'bot.

No biggie.

[theworm[$]]

so why don't we all use them if they stop the viagra ads? (Well, except for the folks who want the viagra ads)

[theeye]

Because they can annoy legitimate senders and delay receipt of legitimate email. Everything's a trade-off.

[emeleel]

Distorted graphic challenges are also a big problem for visually impaired people.

[drmomentum[$]]

Here's one take:

> My reluctant conclusion is that C-R systems with flawed implementations
> have the potential to end legitimate mailing lists as we know them today.

No, it's worse than that. The collateral damage from widely used C/R
systems, even with implementations that avoid the stupid bugs, will
destroy usable e-mail.

Challenge systems have effects a lot like spam. In both cases, if only a
few people use them they're annoying because they unfairly offload the
perpetrator's costs on other people, but in small quantities it's not a
big hassle to deal with. As the amount of each goes up, the hassle factor
rapidly escalates and it becomes harder and harder for everyone else to
use e-mail at all.

[...]

But the real damage from challenge systems will come when spammers start
attacking them. Challenge systems all have user whitelists so that each
correspondent only gets one challenge, then mail goes through directly. So
spammers will start trying to send spam with forged sender addresses that
are on the recipients' whitelists. That's not so hard, sign up for a
mailing list, scrape addresses from the list traffic, then send NxN copies
of spam, to each list address from each list address. Similarly with
addresses scraped in groups from web pages, usenet groups, and anywhere
else scrapage happens.

So what will the effect of this be? You won't be able to trust that mail
from your friends is actually from your friends, since an increasing
fraction will be spam leaking through your challenge system. What will
people do? Given the basic principle of challenge systems, which is that
it's someone else's job to solve your spam problem, people will dump their
whitelists and start challenging every message.

[theworm[$]]

Thanks, JP!