Hey guys. I'm considering banning spamarrest.com and bluebottle.com email addresses from signing up for accounts and newsletters. The reason is that they both use challenge/response to prevent spam. C/R is a selfish method of dealing with spam that offloads the work to everyone trying to send the person email and results in additional spam to unrelated parties forged in from addresses. (SpamCop has a good explanation of why it's bad and why servers that do it are blocked.)
So, basically, with C/R, whenever someone signs up for an account or subscribes to the newsletter, I get an email telling me I have to click on a link and then sometimes perform a CAPTCHA (figure out what the distorted letters are)... all so they can get the mail they asked for. Now spamarrest and bluebottle apparently do this with all accounts, so I can block them and not have to worry about it anymore. I think this is preferable to letting folks think the signups don't work. Or waiting around until I eventually check that email account and bother with the C/R. For other accounts, like Earthlink, that only use it for people that turn it on, I'll probably just auto-delete the C/R messages as Earthlink is one of the annoying ones that makes you figure out a CAPTCHA and enter a description of what the email is.
Unfortunately, when entering in account rules, you block all accounts (both new and existing). So, for existing users and newsletter subscribers, I'll drop them an email letting them know that support for their domain is being dropped with a link back to this topic... and provide them a week to change their email address before I implement the domain filter.
Anyone have any thoughts on this?
Update (Oct 26): I decided to add more detail to the account creation screen mentioning these services by name and that it's up to the user to set things up correctly so that they can receive mail. That way I'm not excluding folks without reason. At least for now. I'll see if I can set the mail server to auto-delete the challenges so they're not cluttering things up.
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They could open a new account later under a different name and email if they miss that deadline.
BTW - I LOVE FF2.0 especially the spell check. I actually don't sound as stupid as I am anymore when posting.
Life is about the journey not the destination!
The Kazoo Spartan
Anyone have any thoughts on this?
Yeah. Do you even have newsletters yet? I've never received any, and I always check my Junk folder for false positives.
Vintage!
Plan on doing the first post-1.0 Suite. But it got delayed a few times for various reasons (trademark, copyright, licensing, full rewrite of my bits, then releases of included software).
Now, if you have any thoughts on the topic at hand, please share.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
+1
sounds like a good idea
if you don't know-ee you should ASCII
I have used this feature with Earthlink. You don’t need to reply. It doesn’t hide your email, it just goes into a separate folder. Once they get the first email they simply click to enter your address their book. I have never known a site to accept replies to a signup form, so for most people it’s not an issue.
Inform people at signup what the sending addy will be. They can add it to their account before submitting the form.
linuxx's solution would work with bluebottle accounts, too.
Jim
Jim
I think it's a waste of your time to have to keep answering the C/R emails. Time that could be well spent on other things that you need to do if we all just stopped using C/R.
I decided to add more detail to the account creation screen mentioning these services by name and that it's up to the user to set things up correctly so that they can receive mail. That way I'm not excluding folks without reason. At least for now. I'll see if I can set the mail server to auto-delete the challenges so they're not cluttering things up.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
that way you can spend more of your time on more important things!
Yours
Steve Lamerton
from Down Under
----
R McCue
Cube Games
People who didn't need people needed people around to know that they were
the kind of people who didn't need people.
(Maskerade)
"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate."
Works for me, never heard of them, so it doesn't in any way effect me, so I say do it and free up your time.
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Deuce {The Core}{Dev Blog}
Portable Software: Just the beginning.
Deuce
Portable Software: Just the beginning.