[Spambayes] SpamBayes now filers less than 50% of my spam.

[Tim Peters]

[Bill Yerazunis, on challenge/response gimmicks]
> ...
> Except that there's no path back to the spammer for the challenge;
> they do their best to cover their tracks as their IP address is the
> one thing that can cost them their upstream connectivity.
>
> thus, C/R systems _will_ stop them.
>
> The problem is that C/R will annoy the rest of us.

I confess I won't respond to a C/R challenge anymore.  The last several
times I tried to play along, the web-based response systems took too damn
long to use, and the email-based response systems bounced my reply with
another challenge!  The latter was almost certainly a bug in the specific
C/R system(s) used, but it's all the same to me:  I gave all the time I felt
I could afford to give when I made the original reply, and any gimmick that
asks me to pour additional time into it is just too onerous to bother with.

But I'm a computer geek, and understand what C/R is trying to accomplish.
My sisters aren't computer geeks, and they won't respond to C/R challenges
either, for quite different reasons:  they never reply to unsolicited email
(in part because I advised them not to), and don't have the specialized
knowledge needed to distinguish a geeky C/R challenge from random
address-harvester spam.  "When in doubt, delete unopened" is basic email
self-defense (esp. for Windows users, which almost everyone's sisters are
<wink>), and a geek-generated challenge is certainly something a non-geek
has reason to doubt.

That said, a C/R system is great for people who don't want to get any email
at all <0.7 wink>.