During the last year I have had several clients ask me what they could do to reduce the amount of spam they receive. While there is no foolproof solution to eliminate all spam, there is one alternative available to individuals today that was not available a few years ago.
Knowing that most spam is "machine generated", several companies (and ISP's) offer email challenge-response solutions to eliminate spam.
Challenge-response solutions all essentially work the same way - messages from people you know (your "whitelist") are delivered to your inbox and all other messages are quarantined. When you receive email from people who are not on your whitelist, they are automatically sent a challenge email. Simply replying to the challenge causes their original message to be moved from quarantine to your inbox and adds their email address to your whitelist. Legitimate senders can respond to these challenge messages, but spammers typically do not.
However, challenge-response solutions do have some potential problems. For example, if you receive legitimate machine generated emails (for example, from your domain registrar or a list/newsletter you subscribe to), the challenge email will likely not be responded to. You will have to manually add these senders to your whitelist.
I recently test drove a challenge-response solution designed for individuals. While the software did what it advertised, before long I realized that it would not work for me. It is virtually impossible for me to create a whitelist of all permitted contacts, and I discovered that some users simply ignored the challenge email.
You have to stop and wonder what will happen as this solution is adopted by more and more users. If both the sender and recipient use challenge-response systems, and are unknown by each other, neither will ever see the challenge and initiate a response.
Regardless of potential shortcomings, challenge-response systems may be a viable solution for some businesses.
To find out more about challenge-response solutions, search for "challenge-response" at Google. For software solutions, go to cnet.com, click on the "Downloads" tab, and search for "challenge-response".
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