Why not allow the e-mail client to pose a Turing test to anybody that is
not in its whitelist?
Many websites are turning to Turing tests to prevent automatic bots from
crawling their sites or otherwise providing data to or from their site. I
am sure we have all been presented at one time or another with a Turing
test in the form of a graphic with some munged characters in it that we
need to identify.
If the e-mail client were able to pose a Turing test to whoever sent it
mail, then it would be easy to identify spammers and to simply not process
their mail.
From an end-user point of view, if I had to identify a series of
characters, animals, or other items in a graphic, the first time I
contacted someone I don't believe I would consider it
obtrusive. Subsequent contacts from me from my original e-mail address
would not need to have a turning test applied as one could safely assume
that it is not an automated system sending the mail as is the case with
spammers and I would have been added to their client's whitelist. (The
client could maintain the whitelist automatically in addition to providing
tools for managing the client's white and blacklists manually.)
With the now common use of the browser on any desktop and for that matter
graphics programs everywhere from where one would want to send e-mail --
even cell phones, I believe that the tools are in place to make it a
relatively painless transition.
-Art
--
Art Pollard
http://www.lextek.com/
Suppliers of High Performance Text Retrieval Engines.
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