Accepting Rejection

*sigh* – but what if just 10%, hell, 1% of your subscriber list decides to adopt CR Chris – that means something like 3000 CR emails for which you or an assistant will have to click on, enter the code that you see on the page, and hit enter. I was having this discussion with someone yesterday – and for the receivers, sure, it's great – but for legitimate list owners – the deeper the infiltration of this service, the more work we will have to do – either oursleves or by hiring someone to click, type, enter, click type, enter, click, type, enter… And that will cost us money. This has already been griped about on several business networks I'm on. However, if we DON”T do it, we risk losing subscribers who could be a source of income. Either way, we could stand to lose. (Enter the RSS evangilist…) Am I being overly pessimistic? *runs off to learn even MORE about RSS…*

hey, sorry about that. it was not a relay problem but something much more low-tech! i had all my mail filtering to my Well acct. and the credit card I was paying that monthly bill with expired (or was maxed out) so until I fixed things with the Well it was bouncing my mail.
All better now (plus I've redirected my mail forwarding to a different endpoint – it's too complicated to explain, but I have lots of domains, almost all forward mail to a pobox address I've had for years and then that goes to my current home email box du jour, capiche?)
Anyway, I've got an overdue Seybold Seminar ppt to finish!

I would never see email replies from my mother with challenge response..she wouldn't know what to do…she would probably think the challenge was spam, and just delete it.
CR is a nifty idea for those of us who have enough tech smarts, but for the newbie masses who only know enough about their computers to surf and email, I think it's a bad idea.
Are you going to explain challenge-response to your 55 year old mother, who, after using IE for several years, only recently discovered that Favorites can be organized in to folders? And only after you showed her (having assumed she knew about it, until you saw her favorites list)?

Challenge /response is not an answer. I use and LOVE Popfile hosted on SourceForge.
I receive all mail that is mailed to me, I just filter what I want to go where. But unlike traditional filtering programs, this actually works. It has a sort of “AI” to learn what you want to go where. After awhile you simply will not get junk mail in the inbox, it will got to a junk folder based on what you concider to be junk.
check it out.

I'm with Matt on this one, more sophisticated filtering is the answer, not this challenge-and-response stuff that reminds me of playing “fort” when I was a kid (and in the long run, it may not procide much more security than our toy forts, either).
Seriously, I mean, the whole CAPTCHA thing is nice, and I'm glad Verisign is using them to protect their web-based WHOIS information, but when you start sending out captcha's in response to an email, it's gone a little over the top. Jodie's right, and it won't just kill email newsletters, it will kill discusion lists like YahooGroups, and probably destroy your ability to 'sign up' to receive notifications of new releases of software (even if you WANT those notifications, like say, with a sourceforge project's automated notification system).
My nightmare scenario isn't even about mass mailing lists … it's about all these people in my address book that can't seem to pick an ISP … if ISP's start implementing CR … every time someone switches providers, we (their more stable friends) end up having to go through this all over again … and considering the size of my address list, this could become a weekly event.

this is to be a problem to be addressed in blogspace. I think a con is in order. In new york. Why? Because… well…. I always have to travel to cons. Chris – want to help me set this up. I am thinking…..
a room of 100 geeks. We stay until we figure out a solution. Then we begin writing papers.
Lots of em. Anyone down?