Believe me, I understand everyone’s frustration with spam. As someone who probably handles more email addresses than anyone who might read this, I probably field hundreds of spam emails every day between those that make it through and those that end up in a collection box I need to go through every few days to make sure nothing important ended up there.

But I am becoming really frustrated with “answer-back” solutions, particularly from Earthlink users who have apparently just discovered them. These users have their accounts set up to send a “challenge” email to any sender, requiring them to respond to a web page proving they are human. That’s nice and all, but the Internet OTR Digest (and other lists) mailing list server ain’t a human, so it can’t respond. And, to be blunt, I have way too much to do in a day’s time to spend any responding to these silly things to prove I am a human, or the list mail the user subscribed to is actually wanted email and not spam.

So any account that sends an auto-challenge to the server is immediately unsubscribed from any mailing lists that account is connected to. I apologize, but if you think about it, it is really pretty foolish to subscribe to an automated mailing list server and then expect it to prove it’s a human. Either manually whitelist the server, or be unsubscribed.

(Yeah, I know, I’m supposed to baby my subscribers. Sorry, kids, but while I don’t ask anyone to know how to program a mail server, I do expect subscribers to have the sense to whitelist mail that subscriber requests. If he or she doesn’t want to take enough responsibility to do that one simple thing, why should I hand-hold him or her?)