Eric S. Johansson wrote:
>> False positives have a very simple solution. Treat it as the first
>> step in a "do something else to get this thru". Just like confirming
>> a mailing list subscription with per-transaction keywords. Or, "click
>> here" to get it through.
> classic challenge response systems have a serious problem if the center
> of the message is a robot. For example, you purchase something on the
> net, you get an invoice from a robot confirming the order and the robot
> is given a challenge message. You never see the invoice and never will
> unless you go to your spam trap and root around in all the garbage.
Who said anything about "you" (the recipient)?
Let's say that you purchase something on the web, the robot generates
the invoice, and the robot sees a challenge (or a reject).
What would intelligent engineering of a system that deals with money
suggest? What would due diligence suggest in the face of the user
typing their email address wrong? Or the recipient mail server being
offline for a bit too long?
Email isn't 100% reliable, entirely aside from spam filtering misfires.
Properly designed systems (ie: those ones that don't get sued for
negligence in handling financial transactions) make allowances for them.
That's right, the reject gets dropped in someone's mailbox on the
sending side, and a human being figures out what to do. Or something
analogous.
It works. We get FP reports regarding robots, mailing lists, "trial
software registration systems" and the like all the time.
The "robot" factor is not an issue with properly designed systems. If
they're not properly designed to handle ordinary exceptions, I'd suggest
that doing business with them at all is a bad idea, entirely aside from
whether they can get thru your spam filters.
> it's a fundamental axiom of animal training that rewarding good behavior
> extremely quickly produces much more rapid change than punishing. See:
> "don't shoot the dog" by Karen Pryor. If we can give a legitimate
> outlet for e-mail advertising, a lot of the incentive to spam will be
> reduced. Those that remain can be punished through negative
> reinforcement techniques like connection grabbing and postage stamps.
This only works when having the dog behave good is the desirable
outcome. I would suggest that, with Stubberfield [*] for example, the
only desirable outcome is an "ex-dog" in Monty Python terminology ;-).
The only way to make Ralsky "behave" is to _promise_ to deliver what he
sends. Do we really want that? I don't think so.
[*] Stubberfield is the unstoppable spammer of "teenage girl with horse"
sex videos - seems to relish spamming children with this crap. Or,
consider the guy who spams animated gifs of dogs and um, you know.
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