TMDA Loses
If TMDA sends any "challenge" messages at all, it has completely failed. It is no good and must be removed. It's a kick in the fucking teeth to anyone who receives one. How would you like it if every single website you visited, no matter what page it was, just to view a page (not sign up for an account, but to provide the basic transaction of HTTP -- delivery of pages, like delivery of email is the basic transaction of SMTP), asked you to fill in a challenge/response to prove you weren't an address harvesting robot?
Even if you don't believe that "every" person would use TMDA, you should at least see what happens to websites that demand hoop-jumping, like the New York Times -- people are openly willing to post to message boards asking for copyright-breaking reposts, direct links and login details rather than jump through any hoops just to see the article. No sane human likes jumping through hoops, and should DETEST jumping through hoops to benefit someone else rather than themselves.
You might think "I'm worth it", and people who want to mail you should jump through a hoop. Well, you're not. I am worth it, however. If you want any technical support for my software, you will NOT use TMDA or any other such system. If I discover you have used it (by getting a challenge), you go on my shitlist and never, ever receive my support again.
I love your "if configured correctly" dreaming. Here's a fucking good idea: if all mail servers in the world were "configured correctly", none of them would be open relays! The amount of spam in the world would drop dramatically, as spammers would have to use their own mail servers to mail out every single spam, as opposed to raping thousands of broken, badly configured open relays. Here's another idea. If nobody replied to SPAM (remember, we're in a fantasy world where pink unicorns roam the land and all anti-spam systems are configured correctly and I never get bounce or challenge messages for replying to people), spammers would give up! Hey! This fantasy, make-believe world is pretty good!
posted Tue 26 Aug 2003 in /issues/spam | link
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