When Alvin Oga wrote,
- a good list manager sw will be able to defeat this faked autoconfirmation from a supposed human confirmation
Jim Galvin asked,
| Would you please describe how one could detect that a message came from | a human and not an autoresponder?
Perhaps to confirm one would have to follow some instructions other than just replying. (Such a requirement would lock out attempted subscriptions by humans who won't read instructions, but that might be a good thing.) For example, autoresponders are likely to quote back (a) none of the received text, (b) all of the received text, or (c) a certain amount from the top of the received text. So if the applicant is sent two confirmation codes and in order to confirm has to return only the lower one without the upper one, a bot is likely to fail. Or if the confirmation code needs to be edited slightly -- say it is twelve characters long, and it has to be sent back with the first five characters moved to the end -- a bot is likely to fail.
And of course, so are 98% of human applicants.
Which makes it very odd that you would consider this "good list management software". If list management software could distinguish between a reply-bot and a human, for it to be considered "good" it would have to do it in a way that doesn't foil the normal human subscription confirmation process. IMHO, such a software product doesn't exist, because there is no way (via text email) to make the process both easy for the human and difficult for a reply-bot. That is why many large free sites are using "type in the word you see in the graphic below" to thwart subscribe-bots, but this technique doesn't work in a plain-text email world.
Will this be the end for "plain text email for those with no web access" mailing lists?
jc
