1. almost who is using Challenge/Response LOVED the service. They have the option, on a user-by-user basis, to turn it off.
IMHO, it is a very GOOD thing and is overwhelmingly liked by the administrations of the three school systems I talked to.
Yes, many of the people who *use* it like it. It's the rest of the world that hates it. See the top 10 reasons why challenge/response (C/R) is bad:
[1] You end up being a spammer (the majority of spam sent to you will result in confirmation requests being sent to innocent victims)
[2] Spammers now send pretend confirmation requests, presumably to make people less likely to respond to C/R requests
[3] Many people respond to C/R requests that they never initiated (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not). Some people who are fed up with bogus C/R requests respond to all of 'em, knowing that the spam will start getting through to people hiding behind C/R.
[4] C/R companies have been known to send out spam and harvest addresses of people sending to their customers, and apparently sell those addresses to spammers
[5] The C/R system is patented, so most anti-spam programs using C/R have legal liabilities waiting to be ironed out. The C/R program you buy today may go under tomorrow.
[6] Confirmations sent to mailing lists won't work
[7] Confirmations sent to others using C/R won't work. If everybody had C/R, nobody could send E-mail to anybody!
[8] People like me that offer a free service (in my case, helping people with DNS) end up losing money (by spending time investigating and responding to C/R systems, dealing with spam received as a result, etc.) and sometimes get fed up with C/R systems and eventually stop offering free advice (never knowing how many people won't get it), harming everybody.
[9] Legitimate E-mail from automated services won't be seen (such as when ordering products online)
[10] Due to #1-#9, most C/R challenges are treated as spam -- if the challenge never gets through, the response will never get through.
In other words, you're doing something nice for your customers, but at the cost of annoying the rest of the world.
-Scott
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