Recently I’ve had a number of customers contact me for support and when my automated system sent them confirmation, I received back a message that said I had to click a link (a challenge/response system). I have a strong objection to these systems (such as the one from SpamArrest) as they put the burden on me even though I didn’t initiate the contact. After clicking the click, these systems now require me to enter a code seen in a graphic which wastes more of my time. In addition, these systems block legitimate email, such as when ordering stuff, signing up for newsletters, etc. Most people won’t remember to white list every site they want to receive email from, so they’ll miss email and get mad when they don’t receive it. I tried a challenge/response system using procmail back in 1996 or 1997 and found that while it did reduce spam, it also almost caused me to lose important email from someone. Personally I’ve found that dspam is a quite effective, non-intrusive, system. When it catches spam, it quarantines it and then I look through the quarantine periodically.
Please people, stop using these stupid systems; they only cause you to lose mail and annoy me to no end. I’ve now put big warnings on my website that says I won’t click on the links. While you might say that it isn’t hard to click on a link, it is extremely annoying and I’m not going to play the game. My anti-spam system, that I’ve been using for about 2 years, I think, catches 95% of the spam that I get.