On Oct 9, 2008, at 6:37 AM, Michienne Dixon wrote:
<snip> I too think C-R spam 'prevention' is the lazy-mans approach at filtering spam. People can easily create their own whitelists based on their maillogs or mailhistory. <snip>
Unfortunately, I feel the majority of the solutions offered cater to the non-technical. The process of simplifying often results in a product that requires the least amount of hands-on from the end-user. Coupled with the fact that the average end-user is not interested in learning a process that takes more then 5 paragraphs to explain and more than 10 minutes to implement (without some sort of "wizard") and I think we have a good idea why the layman's approach is so prevalent.
There are many, many other solutions that satisfy these requirements without massively inconveniencing everyone who tries to send you e-mail. I can only attribute the persistence of C-R as a method for combating spam to the fact that a sufficiently small percentage of humans will believe in *anything*, no matter how ludicrous it is. Hopefully this provides some motivation to those few who still cling uselessly to C-R to go out and spend 15 minutes researching advances in anti-spam technology in the last 5 years. Perhaps they will pull themselves out of the stone ages and stop irritating everyone. -- bk