Re: Anoying Peter Whalley Spam messages.

[Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic pbl ca>]

David Hoffman wrote:

> I have been using TMDA on one of my other accounts since March 15,
> 2003, and since then, I have received a total of 6 spams. Over 114000
> have been blocked by the first methods, and another 13400+ were
> blocked by Spamassassin. The remaining 1300+ that passed those checks
> were from spammers not responding to TMDA challenges. The six that got
> through were because spammers used real e-mail addresses and got the
> challenge messages and then responded to them.

The question is how many legitimate messages you lost in past years, 
because people who sent them were not willing to respond to your 
chalanges?  Before you start convincing people how great TMDA is, couple 
of facts:

TMDA is advertised to have zero false positives.  This is lie.  Not all 
people will be willing to respond to challenges.  Some will simply 
ignore them because it is a waste of sender's time.  There will be false 
positives.  Users of TMDA are simply loosing some of the legitimate (and 
possibly valuable) email sent to them.  This is especially true when you 
post to the list, and people reply off the list for whatever reason.

TMDA challenges often visually look like spam or other types of 
commercial mail.  HTML email with nice graphics and click here link. 
Some folks will not even read it before deleting it.  They'll never know 
they even got the challange.  More lost email for you.

Many TMDA users will tell you "but I haven't had any friend 
complaining".  It doesn't count.  Friends will recognize your name in 
headers.  They'll probably read the spam you send them.  They'll 
probably put with whatever you throw at them.  That is why they are your 
friends.  It is the people that do not know your name, and you don't 
know their name, where you start loosing email without ever realizing it.

TMDA anoys people.  Period.  Even if they reply to chanlenges, most of 
them are anoyed they had to jump through the loops in order to 
communicate with you.  The fact you don't know they are anoyed (or don't 
care to know) doesn't mean they are not anoyed.

--
Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic pbl ca>    Pollard Banknote Limited
Systems Administrator                           1499 Buffalo Place
Tel: (204) 474-2323 ext 276                     Winnipeg, MB  R3T 1L7