Monday, May 25, 2015

What happens when you protect yourself from email spam

As an angry English woman would say, I don't like spam. Therefore, I am quite happy when my email services incorporate a mechanism to auto-detect spam, place it in a junk mail folder, and allow you to review the junk mail to make sure it's not legit (if you're quick enough; the junk mail folder is emptied automatically).

However, there are other systems to keep spam out of your email folder, as I discovered one day.

That day, I was responding to an email that someone - let's call him Clark Kent - sent to me. In his original email, Kent cc'ed several people, one of whom I will refer to as Jimmy Olsen.

When I sent my reply to Clark, I immediately received something from Jimmy - sort of.

I'm protecting myself from receiving junk mail.

Please click the link below to complete the verification process.
You have to do this only once.


I clicked on the link, which sent me to an external spam protection service, and was asked to do two things.

1. Promise Scout's honor that I would never ever send unsolicited email to Mr. Olsen.
2. Enter a response to a CAPTCHA test.

Sounds simple - except that I entered the CAPTCHA response incorrectly (gray letters on a gray background can be hard to read), and therefore had to do it again.

What if I had chosen not to enter it again? What if I had decided, "To heck with Jimmy Olsen, I'll just deal with Clark Kent"?

Jimmy, relieved that he wasn't getting any more 419 scam emails, would never know the difference.
blog comments powered by Disqus