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The other day I received a polite but impassioned plea from Richi Jennings, a consultant who writes about e-mail and spam. He tried to convince me that some of the anti-spam products I wrote about a couple weeks back--programs with features that bounce e-mail back to spammers--can actually increase the amount of junk that we all get.

Here's what he wrote:

Steve, ChoiceMail"s "unknown-sender registration" and the "bounce" features of MailSnoop and MailWasher are really terrible ideas. Don"t forget that the "sender" of spam is almost always forged.

For the love of all that's holy, I beg you not to promote these features -- they will get your readers blacklisted, causing their e-mail not to go through!

I need to clarify what Richi said. You can set some programs to bounce messages back to spammers and make them think your address is no longer working. Quite often a message from a challenge/response system will get treated as spam and bounced back with the rest of the junk e-mail. And quite often these messages float around the Net when someone using challenge/response has a computer virus.

Richi's not just spitting into the wind. I get a half-dozen or so misguided challenge/response e-mails every day; and no, none are for me.

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What's Challenge/Response?

An e-mail challenge/response (often called permission-based) system looks at every message you receive, checks to see if the sender is in your address book, and rejects it if it's not.

The spamming part comes into play when the person sending the e-mail receives a reply from the challenge/response program, challenging the sender to prove he or she isn't a spambot. That's done by asking a simple question or filling in a few letters or numbers. If the sender passes the challenge, the e-mail lands in your in-box.

Take two minutes and read "Spam-Proof Your In-Box" for more details on how challenge/response works.

Richi has good arguments for not using either challenge/response or e-mail bouncing features. I followed all of the links on Richi's blog and one lively debate caught my eye. It's between Richi and Jeff Hendrickson, the developer of Em@ilCRX, and it drills down into the challenge/response hassle.

ChoiceMail VP Takes Umbrage

Everyone's got an opinion. Nebojsa Djogo, VP of software development at DigiPortal Software (the company that makes ChoiceMail), also contacted me about the challenge/response controversy:

While I fully understand your concerns about the challenge/response (C/R) process, I feel that its necessary to correct a number of misconceptions. ...

Don't confuse concept with implementation. A good C/R system will block and just silently delete bounceback messages. In most cases, the From address is bogus and so challenges just go into the void. It may very well be the case that you are getting more bogus challenges than most. It is in the strong interest of spammers to prevent C/R systems from being widely adopted. How better to prevent C/R from being adopted than by causing influential journalists such as yourself to become sufficiently annoyed that you write articles objecting to the process?

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Challenge/Response? Not for Me

My ISP, EarthLink, has a decent challenge/response tool--but I don't use it, for two reasons. The first is technical: Eudora does a terrible job of exporting its address book and EarthLink does an equally poor job of importing Eudora address books.

The other issue is pragmatic: Challenge/response doesn't work. For example, a PC World reader sends me an e-mail and I take a couple of minutes to respond. Then I get an e-mail asking me to take an extra step--click here, go to a Web site, or maybe stand in the corner and whistle a show tune.

Nope, not me. I've already been a good Netizen and responded to the reader's e-mail; and I'm not about to expend more effort. If the person sending me the e-mail had a spark or two, they'd have added me to their whitelist before sending me a message.

Steve Bass writes PC World's monthly "Hassle-Free PC" column and is the author of PC Annoyances, 2nd Edition: How to Fix the Most Annoying Things About Your Personal Computer, available from O'Reilly. He also writes PC World's daily Tips & Tweaks blog. Sign up to have Steve's newsletter e-mailed to you each week. Comments or questions? Send Steve e-mail.