richard lyons <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said on Tue, 1 Jun 2004 12:36:59 -0400:Wow, what nice spammers you meet: give you real addresses. Mine all use fake sending addresses, so would never receive any challenge I sent.
If challenge response ever becomes ubiquitous, then spammers will trivially be able to verify the responses without providing their own email address. They will simply do what the currently do - open up millions of backdoors on cracked computers, go through the address books to look for email addresses, then send using a From: of the current computer. An MTA running via the backdoor will pick up an CR attempts, respond to them, and voila, send spam to a verified email address.
I didn't say everyone was doing this, but as you suggested, enough of them were doing it already that it became ineffective. I was able to get fewer spam delivered to my INBOX through standard filtering means than I was able to block through Challenge-Response techniques.
The most annoying problem is that if you have one spammer who sends you a real address then he will promptly send you hundreds of email in a day. One little leak results in a flod of activity and usually of the very worst kind imaginable.
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