Reply To My Email To Prove You're Real
Can we all agree that spam email is devouring bandwidth? I thought we could. Some statistics show that up to 75% of all email is spam.
With this fact, I wanted to comment on these paragraphs taken from a letter a CMS employee received last week from a current CMS customer.
In a bid to stop spam, our organization blocks all messages from unknown email addresses. If you are contacting our company for the first time, please resend your message with the code "abro" (spanish for "I open") in the subject line. Your message will be delivered and your email address will automatically be added to a list of accepted email addresses.
We apologize for any inconvenience caused and appreciate your co-operation.
Simple math time.
If a single spammer sends out 1,000,000 letters a day (THINK BANDWIDTH) this "challenge" software would generate 1,000,000 response replies (THINK BANDWIDTH).
Multiply this single spammer by say 1,000 spammers. The 1,000,000 messages becomes 1,000,000,000 and generates 1,000,000,000 replies (THINK BANDWIDTH).
And even worse, the original spam email messages probably have faked sender addresses, so these 1 BILLION challenge messages have no valid recipient (THINK MASSIVELY WASTED BANDWIDTH).
Conclusion?
While challenge/response mail filters may reduce the volume of spam reaching your inbox, it almost doubles the amount email floating through the Internet... doubling bandwidth required, slowing delivery of important mail, forcing ISPs to up their bandwidth capabilites and possibly their fees. Incidently, upping the fees directly hits your corporate bottom line.
Sound like a perfect example of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
AAS
3 Comments:
Even worse than this:
1. Do you want your first-time contacts to jump through such hoops to confirm their identity? Most would not bother and go away.
2. Can you imagine the impact on your own mail server as it tries to deliver all those challenge messages? If 75% of all email is spam, then your server is busier deliver challenges to the spam than it is delivering real mail!
Just who is spamming whom?
LTW
Good article, but it’s worse than that. Many spammers are now using “shotgun” techniques, in which multiple random addresses are added to a single inbound message.
That means that if a challenge/response system replies to a message delivered to each mailbox, a single message can generate upwards of 200 responses. But that’s if the system doesn’t query at the transport level.
Some examples: Bluebottle.com.
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