Have you ever seen this before? It was the response I received when contacting a company about their worship presentation software:
“Dear Steven,
Thanks for your email, but at this point I have NOT actually received your message because I have implemented a challenge-response anti-spam system.
Before I can receive your message you must respond as outlined below.
Once you have done this once I will receive your ORIGINAL and all FUTURE messages.
Just reply to this email message - just make sure that the subject of your reply contains the subject of this message.
If you do not respond within 7 days, your message will be DELETED and I will not be able to receive messages from you in the future.
I apologize for this one-time inconvenience, but I have been forced to implement this challenge-response anti-spam solution due to the amount of spam I am receiving.
Thank you,
Sales”
If you’re having problems with spam, use Gmail (on its own, or as part of the suite of Google Apps). It’s got a lot of tools to keep spam out of your inbox. This is a much better (i.e. customer-friendly) solution to requiring potential customers to re-send messages.
From where I’m sitting there are two options:
- Receive no spam, but stop receiving emails from some potential clients/customers/visitors.
- Receive spam, but receive emails from all potential clients/customer/visitors.
Seems like an easy choice to me. Thankfully, this is the first time I’ve come across this ‘anti-spam’ procedure. But if your church or ministry uses this (or something similar), please turn it off!
