ChallengeResponse Systems was Spambuttbuttin Takes Top AntiSpam Honors! 4916

Yes, it's secondary spam, and they really should be ashamed of themselves.

Best solution I've been able to find is to collect and deploy rulesets in my MTA to make it automatically reject (with Delivery Status Notification 55x error codes) all known C-R mailbots' secondary spam -- Earthlink's included. It's really the only way to stop the madness, or at least to not accept handling it and convey the message that it's unacceptable.

Among other people, Peter Karlsson maintains a repository of procmail recipes for that purpose. I keep a pointer to it in my knowledgebase, for reference purposes:

People should be able to figure out how to adapt those C-R-detecting recipes to other environments, such as MTA's filter rulesets (sendmail milters, etc.).

It's actually much worse than that: The C-R challenges, as deployed with trivial potential for abuse by mail forgers ("Joe Jobbers"), become additional, secondary spam. Which is just unforgivable, and nothing that you, I, or anyone else should have to put up with. Fortunately, those of us who are MTA admins, at the bare minimum, are in a position to say "No", globally, to the whole lot -- and that's exactly what I do, and recommend to others.

-- Cheers, "That article and its poster have been cancelled." Rick Moen -- David B. O'Donnel, sysadmin for America Online