[regarding TMDA and similar systems] > The problem with this system is it punishes the good: "Prove you did nothing > wrong". It also makes others responsible, in a way, for your spam problem: "I > don't want to deal with it so jump through a hoop for my convenience."
The problem with this interpretation is that it fails to acknowledge that spam is everybody's problem. It's hardly a chore to reply once to a message saying "I don't recognize you" to be guaranteed that all your future messages will be delivered, compared to the strong possibility that some sort of statistical filter will simply throw your message away and it will never reach the person. Which one of those is more onerous? > I know many mailing lists that will boot you off the list at the first sign > of such a system, and not let you back on. And yes, it does happen, regularly, > since mail from a mailing list, in non-digest mode, comes from the sender, not > the list. If a TMDA-like system is correctly set up, it recognizes mailing list traffic and lets the mail in. I think a list moderator who would ban somebody for a single accidental challenge message to the list is an irresponsible jerk. Do they do the same thing if somebody sets up an out-of-office autoreply and forgets to unsubscribe to the list? > There are ways, such as Postini, ( a great system), and client anti-spam > methods that don't require other people to prove their innocence, as it were, > and they're about as effective. Postini doesn't work worth a darn in my opinion. I get WAY too many false positives, and it has (at least as implemented by my ISP) a ridiculously low limit on the number of "approved" addresses you can have. FWIW, the system I use is a client-side system called SpamSlam. It doesn't work flawlessly and it's not updated often -- it was written by a couple of college students and I think their time is taken up by classes pretty often. But, it does do the challenge/response thing and has rules and statistical analysis. I find that the statistical part doesn't work well, so I shut it off and rely upon the rules and the challenge system. The only stuff that gets trapped by it on a regular basis are messages from companies (like an order confirmation) where the reply-to address isn't read by anybody. --Mike -- To unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> archives: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.letterrip.com/> old-archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.boingo.com/>
