Randy Cassingham's Blog

While reading the news I saw an item that to help with the spam problem, ISP Earthlink plans to implement a "challenge-response" system. When someone sends an e-mail to someone using such a system, the sender gets a "challenge" they have to respond to. Typically, the sender has to click through to a web page and enter a code number, and then the message gets delivered.

Imagine having to do that 120,000 times.

Quite simply, it's rather impossible for me to do that. I don't even attempt to do it for Premium subscribers; as you can imagine, it's not going to happen for the free subscribers! So, if you plan to use such a system and want to continue to get True, be sure you "whitelist" (allow) mail from thisistrue.com and lyris.net (which does the actual sending of these issues). It's moot for Earthlink for the time being, though: they've already been sued by someone holding patents for such a system....

I first warned that spam would become a major problem in 1996, and we still haven't seen the worst of it. MSN reports their servers block 2.5 billion spams per day. That's in addition to whatever gets through their filters. Spam accounts for 80 percent of MSN's incoming e-mail volume.

Who pays for all the servers and bandwidth for all that junk? Its customers -- you. You're not on MSN? No matter: your ISP is suffering too, and passing on its costs to you. Spammers do it because they make money, or at least think they can, by stealing the resources to send the messages it costs them nothing to send out their fraudulent offers. When just a few idiots bite, the spammers make a profit. So to all the morons that have bought something from a spammer, which makes spam profitable: thanks a lot for ruining e-mail for us all. My primer on spam now has its own domain: http://www.SpamPrimer.com.