Stop Email Spam COLD!

Stop Email SPAM cold!

That's right complete email protection is available to you.  Well, at least that's what companies who offer Email Spam protection want you to believe.  There is some truth to it though, you can protect your Email Inbox with a high degree of certainty.  The system that offers this claimed near bulletproof inbox is called a "challenge response" system.  

The way challenge response systems work is that:

1. Software or a service receives an email intended for you, before it goes to your inbox.  
2. They then put that email into a virtual waiting room and it waits there while the system verifies who the sender is.  
3. The system or software verifies if the sender is spam or someone you know, by sending an email back to the original sender.  
- It basically tries to determine if they are a human you want an email from or a computer.
- The thinking is that a spammer sending thousands of emails is using an automated system and wouldn't ever notice this email.  
- On the other hand your friends and family would see the email and write back that they are human by answering silly questions, filling out something, or responding in a specific way.  
4. The system receives the response and analyses it.  
- If the challenge response system says it's a human being then it sends it your inbox.
- If the system thinks it's spam email then it gets destroyed, poof and gone...never reaching your inbox.

Sounds like a nice system right? It does offer VIP level of protection.  However this email spam solution does come with a few downsides:
1. Money - You may have to pay for this service.  
- Only a few internet and email service providers offer this protection at no extra cost.  
- For example, Earthlink (link http://www.earthlink.net) uses a system they call "spamBlocker" which is in fact a "challenge response" spam filter.
2. Time - From the time the system receives an email and sends out the challenge response, the person receiving it may take hours or days to write back.
3. Setup - To get a challenge response working really well you should build an address book (whitelist) of people who never ever get filtered by the system.
- It takes time to setup you're address book with all the friends, family, newsletters, online invoices, etc that you receive, but don't want filtered.
4. False Positives - Sometimes the system will put an email from someone in your address book in your SPAM filter.  
- With some systems that user may even wrongly receive a challenge response from the system.  
- False positives don't happen very often, thus the over 90% protection rate that these systems quote.
5. Annoying - Challenge response systems can be annoying to people not on your whitelist who genuinely are trying to email you.
- Think of the scenario of an old friend that emails you out of the blue or someone from a meeting, guess what they get the challenge response.

Here is some more technical information on challenge response systems from Wikipidea.

If you currently have an email provider or internet service provider that offers this system at no extra cost, by all means take advantage of it.  When properly set up these systems offer superior protection.  There are ways for spammers to get around the systems, but the systems can reduce the amount of spam email you get in a dramatic way.

Related Topic: This site has more information on Email Marketing.