No spam here missus
Earthlink seem to have added this new feature to their email service. If you send an email to one of their customers who does not have you on an approved list Earthlink will mark you as spam but sends back a message to your address asking you to fill in a small form (with visual word recognition) and a short message to try and get the person to open your email. Clever stuff, as the effort of doing this for most spam people is excessive, but for your normal non-spamming person it’s only a minor inconvenience.
sandra said,
March 16, 2006 @ 2:34 am
As long as their word recognition thing isn’t a complete nightmare (a la some others, which make it nearly impossible to decipher letters without a magnifying glass), I’m all about it.
Matt Hobbs said,
June 22, 2006 @ 5:59 pm
Yeah - it was pretty easy. The whole captcha thing is always amusing having tried to implement a few myself. I’m always fascinated by the constant unilateral escalation between reasonable people and spammers in their attempts to out-thwart each other. My fave captcha work-around is when the spammers use porn site signups where they embed the real captcha from another site as part of the signup - ie, they get people to do their dirty work for them. Sneaky but genius.