Add Challenge/Response functionality to Outlook/OE.

[Bob Bell]

Microsoft could quickly and easily help end the spam epidemic by writing a
patch to Outlook and Outlook Express that would add Challenge/Response (C/R)
capability (or at least Graylisting). Along with this new feature, a
streamlined rule-making interface would be very nice as the current interface
for creating rules seems a little complicated for the average user. The
default rule would be to "place any email from a sender not in My Contacts
into the Junk Mail folder and delete messages in the Junk Mail folder that
are more than 10 days old".

With C/R spam is 100% eliminated with no false positives. Email from unknown
senders (neither blacklisted, nor in Contacts) is issued a Challenge to click
on a link and verify their identity. This happens only once, if they verify
their identity they are automatically whitelisted and only manual
blacklisting by the user will stop their emails in the future. If it is a
machine-generated spam that doesn't answer the Challenge, then it is passed
to the Junk Mail folder after X days. Users also have the option to add
mailing lists to their Contacts or a special Whitelist.

A free download from Choicemail provides this basic functionality but as a
seperate task/hack. Microsoft added bayesian filtering to Office 2003, and it
requires more user maintenance than C/R.

Finally, I would like to see this released as a patch to include previous
versions of Outlook / OE starting at Outlook 2000. This would do a lot to
continue the good-will building Microsoft seems to have been doing in the
last year or so.

Thanks,
Bob Bell

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

I have been using C/R on a few mail accounts for more than a year and find
that it doesn't work all that well. Many people are unfamiliar with the
concept and therefore don't respond to the C/R message at all. In any case,
C/R needs to be implemented at the server level -- not as an Outlook
feature -- since a main benefit of C/R is that you don't have to download
all the spam. It just dies off the server if the sender doesn't respond to
the challenge message.

The "rules" you describe are already available and easy to configure in
Outlook 2002 and 2003, one as a rule, the other as the autoarchive setting
on the Junk E-mail folder.

I find the spam filter in Outlook 2003 requires zero maintenance and works
quite well, but as I"m sure you know, there are many alternatives, some
free.