Why SpamArrest and Similar Tools Are A Bad Idea

spamarrest email

Another day I was contacting a group of bloggers and webmasters to propose them a joint venture on a small project. I sent over 20 emails, and one of those bounced back, with a message from SpamArrest. It said something like this:

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.

After you click on the link that they send you, you will still need to type some letters on a CAPTCHA. Overall the process is pretty annoying and time consuming, and the first thing that comes into my mind when I see people using SpamArrest and similar tools is: Why the heck do I have to do with your spam filter?

Needless to say that I did not take the trouble to confirm the email I had sent to that guy. I wanted to get in touch, but I was not desperate for it.

If you are using one of those manual spam blocking tools that requires some action from the sender, there is a high chance that you are losing emails and messages along the way. Sure, if someone has something vital to send to you, they will bear the hassle of clicking the link and the CAPTCHA.

But there are many cases where the other end has something to offer to you, but if there are obstacles to getting in touch with you, he will just drop it off. Suppose a potential advertiser wants to know your ad rates. Should he get an annoying SpamArrest email in response to his inquire, I am sure that he will just shop on the next blog on his list, and you end up losing some money.

The takeaway message is: use a spam filter that does the work on your end, and not one that requires the sender to manually confirm his messages. It is 2008 folks, come on!

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Daniel Scocco on May 22, 2008 | Filed Under Web Tools

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25 Responses to “Why SpamArrest and Similar Tools Are A Bad Idea”

Jaan Kanellis on May 22nd, 2008 11:23 am

If you have that big of spam problem just get a new email address and take of the one you have.
LewisC on May 22nd, 2008 11:30 am

Some people even have their regular spam filtering set too high. I see it quite often with barracuda. I had a recruiter send me an email asking for my resume. The job looked interesting so I did. My email bounced back as spam.

Now they contacted me so I should be in their white list + they get paid only if they get someone to fill a job.

Oh well, it wasn’t THAT interesting of a job.

LewisC
Frank on May 22nd, 2008 11:38 am

I totally agree with you. We get at least a few of those every month with new sign up. Our billing team does not have time to confirm our email address so we can bill a client
Psychotic Social on May 22nd, 2008 11:42 am

I agree it’s a bit of a hassle, I usually do go through the process of verifying - it puts you on a whitelist afterwards for most, that way chances are your emails go through and you never have to do it again. But I’m not like average folks and I can see how annoying this could be.
Ben on May 22nd, 2008 11:45 am

Sounds more like this person doesn’t want any contact with anyone because I would have done the same thing as Daniel. Why bother? Move on to someone less paranoid about spam.
traveler on May 22nd, 2008 11:53 am

True. I know spam is really annoying, but even if I have the choice, I would not want to use a program that could be of a burden to someone that wants to send us something beneficial on either of our parts.
Phil on May 22nd, 2008 1:28 pm

Actually I don’t agree. I use Spamarrest and have for years and have not had any problem losing mail. I am able to look through the quarantined messages and approve those that I want to be white listed.

As someone who previously worked in IT and has tried just about every spam blocking application that is available the spammers seem to be just too smart and I found myself wasting a lot of valuable time wading through the emails in my inbox that weren’t caught or having to spend time “tweaking” the filters to try and make them more accurate.

Since switching to spam arrest which uses a “challenge and response” system as Daniel described I have absolutely NO spam in my inbox because most spam is sent by robots which will not take the manual steps necessary to approve their own messages.

Spam arrest allows me to upload all of my existing contacts to my white list, and is also setup so that anyone I send an email to first automatically gets whitelisted. Most people I have talked with don’t mind taking the steps necessary as they too are bothered by too much spam and appreciate the need to do something to take control back.

I have been using their systems for years and at first was afraid of losing business and missing emails - but I no longer worry about that. In most cases a person or potential client that wants to contact me will take the steps to approve themselves (which only needs happen once). If not I take a few minutes every day or two to look through the quarantined messages and manually approve the ones that should get through.

While it still takes some action on my part I find it MUCH less time consuming than the alternative method which I used for years and my inbox is devoid of any bs.
Shannon Smith on May 22nd, 2008 1:31 pm

I use Spam Arrest, and you can set it so that you do everything manually and those emailing you don’t have to jump through hoops to get their message to you. I set it that way because I’m the same way. I’ll usually say forget it rather than go through the confirmation process.
Daniel Scocco on May 22nd, 2008 1:42 pm

@Phil. for one thing, looks like you are with the minority. Most people agree those systems are plain annoying and not effective.

As for blocking spam, I really don’t see the chaos you do. Usually I get one or two spam messages at most every month, the rest is all legit. And that is using a standard Gmail account.
infmom on May 22nd, 2008 5:02 pm

I really, really hate those stupid spam blockers. If I encounter one in a situation where getting through to someone is a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, I will leave it. It’s almost as bad as call waiting on the rudeness scale.

MailWasher Pro does a fine job of filtering spam for me. Yeah, it may take a little extra time to look through the list of emails (on multiple addresses all at once) and delete the spam, but it sure beats telling all potential correspondents to go away.

Phil, if you use MailWasher Pro those spams will never make it to your inbox in the first place.
Todd on May 22nd, 2008 6:29 pm

The company I work for uses SpamSoap. Works great.
PeterL on May 22nd, 2008 7:54 pm

I have also now used SpamArrest for years and am essentially very happy with the results. Once in a blue moon I hear from someone that that couldn’t figure out the process. And I get almost no spam at all.

I am a Mac user, and thus can’t use MailWasherPro (Windoze only)… I have yet to find any better solution. I still find that Gmail & Yahoo Spam filters get confused and never reliably sort out the essentials.
jonson roth on May 22nd, 2008 10:44 pm

So true. This is an incredibly annoying development in email communication.
costa on May 22nd, 2008 11:35 pm

couldn’t agree more, Daniel. If it takes so much trouble just to get an email through, I will be deleting that address from my contacts lists. Anyway, I think the spam filters with gmail already works fine with me.
Celito on May 22nd, 2008 11:36 pm

Spam filters have grown to be really powerful these days. There is no need for something like Spam arrest. Gmail catches most of the spam right. So just set up your POP3 account to come through via a Gmail account and its all done. As a second measure, I use Apple’s Mail client which learns as you go. Although, with Gmail, I hardly have had to use it.
Doc on May 22nd, 2008 11:39 pm

Nothing beats a decently refined mail server spam filter.

I do web hosting for a few dozen clients and still mainly use spamassassin (and SPF DNS records) to keep their inboxes clean.

If you’re paranoid about false positives, allow a small margin of low-scoring spam spam through and delete the rest. All you need is a message rule in your favourite e-mail reader to filter the tagged stuff out, and you’ll never have to worry about disgruntled senders again (other then those plucky spammers, anyway)

Receiving 5 spam emails a day beats the hell out of missing 5 legitimate messages due to lazy senders, anyday
Joe on May 23rd, 2008 1:22 am

Blah! I agree with you, Daniel. I wouldn’t be typing in a captcha just to send an email! That’s just too much for a simple email.
BlogTalks on May 23rd, 2008 7:27 am

I wholeheartedly agree, as much as I hate spam making me jump through hoops to email you is not going to work.

That aside Gmail does do a good job of filtering spam.
Michael Roach on May 23rd, 2008 10:46 am

I totally agree about the annoyance factor involved with Spam Arrest. I’ve encountered this a couple of times when actually trying to pay for something…

Hold on a second, I’m trying to BUY something from you, and you’re making jump through all these damn hoops? What are you thinking?

Another issue I have with Spam Arrest is that filtering, or blocking, spam does NOTHING to actually STOP spammers. I don’t filter spam at all — I let it all come through. Most of it ends up in my Junk Email folder, of course… Whatever doesn’t, I drag and drop into it.

From there, I forward all my junk email (as attachments to one email) to http://www.SpamCop.net. (Once you set up an account, they’ll give you a specific email address to forward your spam.) Their program will analyze each attached email, figure out the source IP, and prepare spam abuse reports to the appropriate ISP contacts. The program also finds ’spamvertised’ URLs in the email and prepares spam reports for the host ISP.

The prepared reports munges, or blanks, your email address for protection from spam-friendly ISPs.

This practice has nearly eliminated any spam for me. I used to get over 100/day, now I get less than 20. Sometimes, less than 10. I’d rather report spammers than simply filter them.
slippers on May 23rd, 2008 12:46 pm

wow…
thanks for the advice,
never think of this kind of stuff are a bad idea.
good luck mate
PodStorage on May 23rd, 2008 5:37 pm

You all need a lesson in going on your reader’s journey. It is not about you, it is about them. Sounds to me like many of you think your readers are stupid, annoying, or not worth the time.

If you were a sales person in my company, you butt would be on the street.
The Masked Millionaire on May 23rd, 2008 9:28 pm

My blogging software seems to be real good at catching spam trackbacks. It seems all trackbacks are spam.
Meeven on May 24th, 2008 4:14 pm

If you’re using email addresses based on your own domain, the best solution is probably to use a hosted spam filtering service like MXLogic or Postini. You can get it for just over 5 dollars at email providers such as Luxsci.com

It does more than your ordinary spam filter. Some advantages are:

- spam never reaches your inbox at all. You don’t even have to sift through a spam folder in your email client to figure out which is spam and which is not
- no user training required other learning how to login to your quarantine area
- facility for whitelists and blacklists on a per email account basis
- global whitelists and blacklists too
- depending on the package you select, you get either double or triple worm protection engines. The service is also fantastic as filtering viruses.
- most important, it protects your domain email from common email
- attacks such as email bombs, directory harvest attacks etc.

I used to use BoxTrapper for controlling spam, which works exactly like SpamArrest and I really hated it, as did my correspondents. I found my peace in hosted spam filtering.
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Lit on May 25th, 2008 9:40 am

I think I am going to try spam arrest…it seems you have full control and in reality you will lose fewer emails….Regular spam filters are not smart enough to distinguish 100%. I am always losing important emails with standard filters. IF they really want to get in touch, they will follow through…just like a phone call.

I just get too much spam, 100s per day. I have a few email accounts though.
Brett on May 27th, 2008 11:41 am

Great article. It puts the effects of spam in perspective. The comments and the article have both given me great general information about spam and spam control.

Brett

http://www.thegrowingroom.net