As the flood of spam increases finish users are looking for new and more effective solutions to block spam. In turn software developers are knocking themselves out trying to come up with the killer app that will stop spam forever.

For several many years now companies have been focusing on sooner and smarter software to be installed on your PC or on your servers that will detect spam through increasingly more complex algorithms. The ingenuity behind these products cant be argued with. The problem was that as the spam filters became better so did the quality of the bulk email software used by the spammers. The battle to fight spam was spiralling out of control.

Theres an old scientific principle called Occams Razor. It simply means that all things being equal the most simple solution is commonly the best one.

Somebody somewhere realized that there was a simple solution to the vast majority of spam. Spammers e mail millions of many people each day. This is an automated process that they cant possibly monitor manually. Enter challenge response spam email filtering.

When using a challenge response system each e-mail address must be authorized to deliver email to you. You might either authorize these e-mail addresses manually by adding them to your challenge response whitelist or the challenge response email server can take care of that for you.

The process is simple but incredibly good.

Spammer sends e-mail

Challenge response electronic mail server doesnt recognize address so issues a challenge e mail that must be phyiscally answered by a real human.

Challenge answer = yes = sender is authorized to send you electronic mail

Challenge answer = no = senders electronic mail address is added to blacklist and all future e mail from them is automatically blocked.

Challenge repsonse spam filters demand that a real human reply to the challenge email. Spammers who contruct millions of emails a day simply dont have the instant to do this and are therefore blocked from sending you any future junk email.

Using a challenge response system initially might be excess work but after 30 days you will see a dramatic reduction in the amount of e mail you receive from spammers. Our challenge response system is currently showing 11,000 blocked pieces of spam in the last *5 years*. Those are hard figures to argue with.