design: impulsant
Tuesday, December 21, 2004

The end of SPAM as we know it...

The site isn't launched officialy but I want to share this service with you before the rest of the world hears about it. Junker is a new way and method to stop ALL spam. It's not a filter. It's not something that tries to be smart. It doesn't read your email. This is the future of anti SPAM services. Junker uses challenge/response technology to determine the difference between a human and a computer. A human being can take 10 seconds to go to a website, look at an image with 4 characters on it and have the ability to type those characters in a form and press submit. It would take a very sophisticated computer to do the same thing. And more importantly, it would take several seconds per message which would make it impractical and to expensive. Spammers send out hundreds of thousands of messages per day. They hope that 0,0001% of all receivers do something with their message. If they would have to take 10 seconds between every new message that just wouldn't add up. This is the vulnerability that Junker exploits. When a Junker user get's a message from somebody who that user hasn't corresponded with before, the service sends a simple message (for a demo send a message to demo@junker.nl) with a challenge to this new sender. If that sender is human, it will take him a minimum of effort to answer that challenge and identify himself. A spammer will just ignore the message. Only verified email will arrive in the mailbox of the Junker user. I started to use the service on monday and haven't received a single SPAM message ever since. My whitelist of approved people has grown to about 50 people. This might just be the end off SPAM as we know it...

And since I started this company that would make me very happy, and rich.

2 Comments:

  • The idea is nice, and it works. A couple of my newsletters (opt-in of course) have several users that use this or similar stuff. It's a good think this one has a real whitlist, since many have none and you need to re-verify every time. The other downside: you subscribe to a newsletter. You do not know the sending address it originates, so you cannot whitelist it yet. And after sending out the newsletter, nobody checks it at the company, so you also loose all your opt-in newletters.

    By Blogger Bas van de Haterd, at 11:36 am  

  • We tell people to check their Pending box regularly the first month to whitelist their newsletters. I forgot how many newsletters I was subscribed to until I noticed them in my own Pending box. If you subscribe to a new newsletter you just visit your Pending box after 5 minutes and whitelist it right there. No problem at all...

    By Blogger Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, at 12:37 am  

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