[altharaz]

In France we have a software vendor called MailInBlack.

Their solution is exactly the one proposed in this article, where the sender has to solve a “challenge” to get in your mailbox.

If I think this approach is really effective, it also creates a huge pain for a lot of tools relying on emails such as WebEx invites or when you want to contact someone for sales.

As a result I think that this approach might be better if it was for instance triggered only on emails with an “Unsubscribe” link, or on emails with specific keywords.

[getpost]

This is super-annoying for legitimate, infrequent correspondents. Somebody asks me to email them something, and I need to take the time to notice and read the automated response, click to access an unknown website, and then try to solve the captcha, which sometimes requires multiple attempts. You asked for my recipe, don't hassle me when I'm trying to help you.

[BeetleB]

When I set it up, I knew it could be annoying, which is why I automatically whitelisted everyone I knew. I was seriously concerned people would rather just not be able to send me emails and will willfully ignore my emails, but as I pointed out, that's the exception rather than the rule.

And I am proactive. If I see an email in the quarantine folder from someone I want to be on the whitelist, I press a button and he's in. This isn't a hard line, binary, black and white situation. I can and do place people in the whitelist.

If I've requested something from someone, I don't expect them to respond to the email, and I usually reply back to them with an apology about the email. So far, no one has complained.

And I don't use captchas. There's no need for them. All they have to do is click on the link and type in their email address.

[dalai]

If you still check the quarantine folder once a week, do you even need the challenge email? At most it will take a few days longer to reply to a valid email and then you can whitelist the sender.

[BeetleB]

Think of it as "if they respond to the challenge email it'll get in front of my eyes quicker".

Also, keep in mind when I wrote it, I was getting 20-50 spam a day (not counting unsubscribe emails). And part of the motivation was that legitimate emails were simply getting lost (I wouldn't notice them in the sea of noise). Checking once a week would mean scanning hundreds of emails for the few legitimate ones. The challenge-response is more reliable.

(Today I get almost no spam - someone fixed a broken pipe on the Internet).

[masukomi]

Are you speaking from experience or theorizing?

My thought is that if i asked you for an email, and I was running a system like this, i wouldn't be a dick and make you jump through that hoop. I'd proactively add your email to the whitelist before you even sent me something.

[BeetleB]

In practice this is not as easy as you think. More often than not, you don't know the email address they will use. I often tell them up front that they'll get a spam checking email that they are free to ignore. I whitelist once I get their email.

[sokoloff]

Who is to say that you have their email address? Even if you do, who is to say that the mail you're asking is going to come from that email address?

[getpost]

Exactly! I meet someone and they ask for info. I offer to email them with the info. I get their card and they don’t ask for my email address. I’m speaking from experience.

Even if they have my address, how soon is it whitelisted? Like, they run home and update their whitelist?

In at least one case, I suspect this set up is narcissistic. ‘People have to kow-tow to communicate with me.’

[glitchc]

Next time, write your email address on their card and give it back to them. If they really care about the information, they will follow up.

You shouldn't bother writing unsolicited emails with your advice to people who may not care. It's a waste of your valuable time.

[BeetleB]

>If I think this approach is really effective, it also creates a huge pain for a lot of tools relying on emails such as WebEx invites or when you want to contact someone for sales.

I haven't used WebEx, but what is the problem exactly? Are you concerned you won't see the invite or that the sender will get an annoying automatic response?

Incidentally, this is all just a Python script. If you can construct a reasonable enough pattern for the email address, you can always have custom rules for them - it's fairly trivial. Just like I have a list where emails go straight to quarantine without producing an annoying email.

>or when you want to contact someone for sales.

My original design was to automatically whitelist anyone I send email to - in the end I didn't go that far, but it will likely alleviate this problem. My solution is mostly for my own personal email, though. If you plan to conduct a lot of business where you expect/want random people you don't know to email you, then this scheme won't work well.

>As a result I think that this approach might be better if it was for instance triggered only on emails with an “Unsubscribe” link, or on emails with specific keywords.

I just did a query. Fully one third of the quarantined emails do not have the word "unsubscribe".

[altharaz]

> I haven't used WebEx, but what is the problem exactly? Are you concerned you won't see the invite or that the sender will get an annoying automatic response?

Basically, WebEx sends invites from their own email address. If your customer has not white-listed the WebEx domain, they will not receive the WebEx invitation. The only solution we found for our sales team is to "double" the invitation with a manual email sent separately, with the link to the WebEx invitation...

Also, I just realized that I was not very clear in my comment: my company does NOT use MailInBlack :). However, a lot of our customers do, and this has been a nightmare for our WebEx invitations process.

[BeetleB]

>Basically, WebEx sends invites from their own email address. If your customer has not white-listed the WebEx domain, they will not receive the WebEx invitation.

That's rather obvious. If they want to receive emails from WebEx, they should whitelist it. Keep in mind that the quarantined emails are like emails in any folder. You can still check them to see if there are important emails there.

Now I don't know much about WebEx, but ... are you sending WebEx invites to people who are not expecting an invite? If so, I would say my filter is doing its job! That's exactly the type of email I'm trying to cut down on. If, OTOH, I am expecting an invite from you, I will check the quarantine folder for it. And as I said earlier, if WebEx becomes big enough that I expect many people will use it to contact me, I'll just whitelist and put it in the low priority folder.

Fundamentally, the problem is that we've overloaded emails. Emails (for most people) were a means of communicating between individuals. Then people started using it as a TODO list. Then as an advertising platform. Then as a way to manage receipts. Then as a calendar system. And on it goes. One of my goals is to separate the personal emails from everything else. I may still use it for other things, and set up scripts to handle those other things, but I need a way to separate out personal emails from everything else.

Now if WebEx also starts sending me unimportant emails, they're out of the whitelist. Kind of like LinkedIn. It uses [e-mail] for all its emails - whether it is to notify me that someone sent me a message or to let me know that "Hey, if you're willing to become a Premium member, everyone will want to hire you." - They are not in my whitelist.

And BTW, there is only one customer: Me :-)

[tetraca]

Use the WebEx Productivity Tools extension for Outlook. Whenever I used WebEx with a client I supported, I would open up a new meeting in my calendar, type them a personal message, then click an "Add to WebEx" button and it'd automatically put all the necessary call information at the bottom of the invite. It'd be from the company email and I'd receive replies/notices of acceptance directly.