On the contrary. If I've spent the time to compose an email
to someone the
last thing I want is a bounce back of *any* sort - be it a vacation
message, an answering machine, or a challenge system.
Yup, it is all spam. Call back systems don't reduce spam, they
increase it. If everyone used a callback system and no whitelists
50% of all the email on the internet would instantly become spam.
Vacation messages can have their place, if they could be sent in
a manner that the MUA could make reasonably transparent to the
end user.
For example it is quite useful to me to know when I send a message
to someone in VeriSign that they are away, I simply select another
volunteer to do whatever I had in mind (my initials aren't PHB for
nothing).
What I find really irritating is out of office vaction notices to
mails that I have sent out to hundreds of people.
I think there are also problems with the fact that SMTP really
was not architected to support the relay sender mode. It is a
hack that is not really designed properly. I should never ever
have to see an EMAIL giving me a status report. This should be
communicated through a separate UI channel, not the data channel.
Bounce back schemes on the other hand piss me off completely, as
folk will know from my interactions with Dan Bernstein whose
obnoxious spambot responds to every message you send to him,
telling you that if he thought you were really important he
would have whitelisted you.
Another problem with bounceback schemes is that a lot of them
have privacy issues. One hosted service recently spammed all the
recipients of email their customers had posted to through their
service.
Also witness the SpamArrest situation. I bet that we'll see
less and less
people responding to challenge systems because they fear they will be
spammed at some point in the future by the company running the system.
They will get spammed whether or not they respond.
I think that callback loops are acceptable only when the mail
is bing sent to a large number of people and it is reasonable
to expect senders to take more care. For example I think that
it is quite reasonable for IETF mailing lists to require
non-subscribers to answer a callback to post. This has an
additional advantage of preventing Dan Bernstein from ever
posting unless he disables his spambot.
Phill
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