As the flood of spam increases finish users are looking for new and more efficient 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 years now businesses have been focusing on quicker 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 can not be argued with. The problem was that as the spam filters became better so did the quality of the bulk electronic mail 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 fairly often the best one.

Somebody somewhere realized that there was a simple solution to the vast majority of spam. Spammers email millions of many people each day. This is an automated process that they can not possibly monitor manually. Enter challenge response spam e-mail filtering.

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

The process is simple but incredibly efficient.

Spammer sends electronic mail

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

Challenge answer = yes = sender is authorized to send you e-mail

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

Challenge repsonse spam filters demand that a real person reply to the challenge electronic mail . Spammers who contruct millions of emails a day simply do not have the time to do this and are therefore blocked from sending you any future junk e-mail.

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