[Baypiggies] Challenge/Response email systems

[Anna Ravenscroft]

On 6/16/06, Anna Ravenscroft <annaraven at gmail.com> wrote:

> Lastly, on a less "practical" plane and more emotional one: my
> emotional reading of it as a signal is - "oh, this person wants to be
> left alone. Okay, I won't bother them anymore. " and avoid emailing
> the person in the future. This may not be the person's intent (and may
> or may not be a common reading), but it's something users of C/R
> systems may want to be aware of.

Ick! I had clicked on "reply to all" to send my response to the
lmailing list and it sent a copy automatically to Marilyn. Instead of
the usual "reply to this email" challenge, it expects me to click on a
link!

Talk about a way for spammers to get real eddresses (oh yes, click
here!) I don't remember every single person I may have emailed (yes -
I probably *do* send far too much email) so no way would I just click
on some random link that happened to be in an email. The *least* I
would expect would be a copy of my original email to Marilyn so I
could at least judge whether it's a legitimate challenge to something
I actually sent or something out of the blue from some spammer,
without making me have to search through my sent box.

[shudder] Sorry but this is a really unpleasant variant of the
challenge/response system, imho.

Anna