Proving they're real people

[leesw]

I've sent emails to people before and received a reply back asking me to click on a link and prove that I'm a real person and not a spam bot.

I think I'm wanting to get one of these and am wondering if anyone knows of any free ones and if they are set up to allow some automatic emails (like forms from my own website).

Thanks
Lee

[wige]

Originally Posted by leesw

I think I'm wanting to get one of these and am wondering if anyone knows of any free ones and if they are set up to allow some automatic emails (like forms from my own website).

Every challenge system I have seen seems to be based on a white list. You would enter the automatic e-mails you want to be able to recieve to that list ahead of time and you would not have any problem. Unfortunately most of the systems I have seen are for e-mail servers that you would install on a corporate mail server. I am not sure about the availability of a personal version.

[bigturkey]

Originally Posted by leesw

I've sent emails to people before and received a reply back asking me to click on a link and prove that I'm a real person and not a spam bot.

I think I'm wanting to get one of these and am wondering if anyone knows of any free ones and if they are set up to allow some automatic emails (like forms from my own website).

Thanks
Lee

Do you mean you'd like to send these links in emails as an auto-response to email you receive (1), or do you mean as a confirmation that a web form was submitted by a human?(2)

Scenario 1
It's really a customised mail client you are looking for - should be easily achievable in Outlook. Essentially you want an incoming email account which has an auto-responder setup (kinda like the out of office thing), only this time - you need to be able to parameterize the users email address, and embed it into a URL.

eg: please click here to confirm http://example.com/emailconfirm.php?...im@example.com

The emailconfirm.php script would simply send you an email (to a different account) to say go look in the first one for an email from jim@example.com

Like I said - outlook should be able to do that without too much trickery

Scenario 2 - human confirmation
If it's the human confirmation you are looking for, a very effective method is to simply put a simple question at the end of the form.

For example, something like, 'in words, what does five plus five equal?' or, 'please enter the number, eleven'

It's a simple but effective way of eliminating form spam.

Also there's the CAPTCHA images.


If you'd like your website to respond to email, that's a different problem altogether : )

HTH
- rich