Mailblocks Offers Free, Scaled Down Challenge Response

Email

from the still-annoying dept

I’m still not a huge fan of challenge-response anti-spam systems, but I’m slowly changing my mind on them, depending on how they’re used. My problem with them, from the beginning, is that they have a huge false-positive rate – in that they basically consider everything spam, and only people who have emailed you before are considered legitimate (until they jump through an extra hurdle to contact you). It still seems a little obnoxious to make people jump through such an extra hurdle, but I can see some situations where it could work. I still think that instead of completely ditching all the emails that it holds up, people should get a chance to manually go through the list and approve emails. This way, it acts more like a prioritization system. If people want their email to definitely get through and be a priority, they can answer the response – but it’s not required. Still, it’s unclear how well the big player in the space, Mailblocks, is doing these days. Launched a year ago with a ridiculous amount of hype for what really amounts to a me-too play, they spent time and money on an ill-advised strategy of threatening to sue all their competitors for patent violation (which hasn’t gone well so far). At the same time, people have been reporting serious problems with the service – such as having the server go down and completely bouncing all email. Also, they recently (and tragically and unfortunately) lost their founder, who died unexpectedly at a very young age a few weeks ago. The company is moving on, however, and are now introducing a free, ad-supported, version of their product to try to entice new users. It’s lacking some features, but will probably find some users. However, it does suggest that people weren’t rushing to sign that quickly to sign up for the paid version.