Spam Blockin’ Puppies!
The latest weapon in the war on spam is, apparently, puppies.
My job requires me to email a lot of customers as a representative of different companies, so I end up changing the “From” field on my business emails a lot. This tends to trip up spam blockers, who see that the reply address and the sender’s IP don’t match up. I’ve gotten used to seeing things like Earthlink’s “We don’t know who you are. Click on the link so that the recipient knows you’re a human being, and not a spam-bot” email. An email today kicked this kind of junk mail filtering, as Emeril might say, up a notch.
It still followed the “authentication challenge” process Earthlink and the others use, but instead of just clicking a link, the email included a picture of a set number of puppies. You, as a non-spammer, were required to click on the appropriate colored button that gave the number of puppies in the photo.
Finally, anti-spam technology my 3-year-old niece can appreciate!
Popularity: 5% [?]
February 19th, 2004 at 9:05 am
Awwwwwwwwwww … puppies!
Anyhow, authentication/white-listing seems to be the way people are going now.
Too bad SMTP has no authorization.