By using a system of “trackers”, which were used to subscribe to mailing list, any mail to that tracker address was assumed to be legitimate. So individual posters were not challenged. If the tracker got to be so well known that it was overly spammed, you could just throw the tracker away and start up with another one, although this never was a problem for me.
As for Jud’s concern, with Mailblocks as soon as you send email to anyone they are automatically authorized. You can of course manually de-authorize them if it turns out to have been a mistake.
One other nice feature was that as soon as you authorized someone, they became authorized for all subscribers to Mailblocks, the point being to sort out the real people from the computer-generated spam.
In any case, I am EXTREMELY happy with Fastmail, which does not use Challenge/Response but is so much more powerful than Mailblocks in every area. I highly recommend it (and of course I have no financial interest there).
Barry
From: "John C. Welch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Wed, 02 Nov 2005 22:22:01 -0600
Subject: Re: Web based IMAP Server
...
But it is a good way to get rid of email traffic, esp. from mailing lists,
as most listmoms will boot you right off a list when your challenge -
response system commences to spamming the other list members, and they
always do.
From: Jud Spencer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Wed, 02 Nov 2005 20:32:54 -0800
Subject: Re: Web based IMAP Server
On 11/2/05 8:22:01 PM, "John C. Welch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
...
That's not to say that it isn't a decent idea. The current implementations
aren't very smart though. They should at least be smart enough to auto-allow
any address that you've sent mail to in the last N days.
