ChallengeResponse Systems was Spambuttbuttin Takes Top AntiSpam Honors! 4915

On Sat, 01 Oct 2005 22:11:45 +0000, Alan Connor

Yes, I know. I keep getting challenges from Earthlink for mail I never sent. I receive enough per day for them to be a spam-like nuisance and I'm now filtering them out using Spambuttbuttin. Earthlink hasn't responded to my feedback (no real surprise), so what else am I to do?

I know you've been asked this many times and as far as I know you've never given an answer, so I'll try anyway - when a spammer has hijacked my address and used it as the Reply-To address in a spam to someone, how is challenge-response anything other than a form of spam to me? The challenge is simply sent to the forged Reply-To address.

Hasn't the burden of dealing with spam simply been pbutted from the Earthlink user and on to me? I'm being pestered to provide a response to a spam mail I'm not responsible for so in effect, the spam I knew nothing about has reached me anyway.

I'd be interested in your comments on this because it seems to me that it's not a very workable system if this is all it can do. It doesn't fight spam at all; it just redirects it somewhere else.