[LINK] Fwd: Please confirm your message

[Adam Todd]

At 11:22 PM 4/12/2006, Ivan Trundle wrote:
>On 04/12/2006, at 9:37 PM, Adam Todd wrote <lots, omitted here>:
>
>This is the kind of annoyance that only wastes everyone's time on the
>net - and I'm not prepared to suffer the consequences of such a
>challenge/response regime.

I just wanted to ask one question.

When you subscribe to a mail list (or e-bay, or yahoo, or msn, or ...), 
99.9% have a challenge process of sending you an email, which often takes 
hours to come to you, and then you reply to the email or click on a link.

Does this offend you as much as reducing spam and increase productivity in 
private communications?



-------- FROM THE TMDA FAQ --------------


A common misconception about systems based on whitelisting with challenges 
is that few of us are so irresistible that people will jump through extra 
hoops to talk to us.

In actual practice (5 years of using TMDA), I've not found this to be the 
case at all, and most TMDA users will agree. If someone took the time to 
craft and then send you a message, they will most likely take a few extra 
seconds to reply to a one-time confirmation request. Phrased another way, 
by writing to you, the sender also fulfills a need of their own---it's not 
purely to your benefit that you receive their message. If they refuse to 
confirm simply out of spite, that need goes unfulfilled (which is why this 
is so rare).

Once upon a time, people had the same sort of objections about 
authenticating a mailing list subscription; something we now take for 
granted. TMDA's confirmation mechanism is really no different.

In any case, TMDA provides several different ways to monitor who sent you 
mail, who didn't reply to their confirmation request, etc (see next FAQ entry).