David Hoffman wrote:
I have been using TMDA on one of my other accounts since March 15, 2003, and since then, I have received a total of 6 spams. Over 114000 have been blocked by the first methods, and another 13400+ were blocked by Spamassassin. The remaining 1300+ that passed those checks were from spammers not responding to TMDA challenges. The six that got through were because spammers used real e-mail addresses and got the challenge messages and then responded to them.
The question is how many legitimate messages you lost in past years, because people who sent them were not willing to respond to your chalanges? Before you start convincing people how great TMDA is, couple of facts:
TMDA is advertised to have zero false positives. This is lie. Not all people will be willing to respond to challenges. Some will simply ignore them because it is a waste of sender's time. There will be false positives. Users of TMDA are simply loosing some of the legitimate (and possibly valuable) email sent to them. This is especially true when you post to the list, and people reply off the list for whatever reason.
TMDA challenges often visually look like spam or other types of commercial mail. HTML email with nice graphics and click here link. Some folks will not even read it before deleting it. They'll never know they even got the challange. More lost email for you.
Many TMDA users will tell you "but I haven't had any friend complaining". It doesn't count. Friends will recognize your name in headers. They'll probably read the spam you send them. They'll probably put with whatever you throw at them. That is why they are your friends. It is the people that do not know your name, and you don't know their name, where you start loosing email without ever realizing it.
TMDA anoys people. Period. Even if they reply to chanlenges, most of them are anoyed they had to jump through the loops in order to communicate with you. The fact you don't know they are anoyed (or don't care to know) doesn't mean they are not anoyed.
-- Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic@xxxxxx> Pollard Banknote Limited Systems Administrator 1499 Buffalo Place Tel: (204) 474-2323 ext 276 Winnipeg, MB R3T 1L7
