Re: [cobalt-users] TMDA

[Wayne <cobalt@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Jeff,

On Mon, 15 Dec 2003 15:47:36 -0800, you wrote:

>On Monday 15 December 2003 03:25 pm, Wayne wrote:
>
>> I am a
>> happy camper now and spend less time dealing with the spam.
>
>I'm glad it works for you, Wayne.  I, and a lot of other admins, block 
>all challenge/response sites.
>
>In general, if anyone using a return address on my servers tries to 
>contact a challenge/response site user directly they'll never see the 
>challenge you the user will never see their email.
>
Let me understand. This means that your server some how can tell the difference
from normal mail and a challenge response mail. How does it do that?

>For you, since you run your own challenge response site, unless I try to 
>contact you directly and get a challenge/response email from you I'll 
>never see your message and I'll never block you, so users having return 
>addresses on my servers will not be affected unless they don't know 
>what to do with the challenge-response email.
>
Now I am confused. Isn't this saying the opposite of the previous paragraph?
There you say that the challenges are blocked and here it seems the challenges
are not blocked. Still confused.

>Why do we do this?  Because we see the problems with challenge/response 
>mechanisms.  Evidently you don't, and that's fine.  Surely you realize 
>that every method of dealing with spam has the risk of blocking you 
>from parts of the Internet.
What sort of problems have you had. I would be interested to know. The only
thing I see so far is the burden put on the sender sending mail to me to reply
to the challange response. Usually what I do there is to add their name to the
whitelist when I see their mail in the pending file. Are there other problems?
The more information the better. Please let me know. Thanks in advance.

Wayne

>
>Jeff