Yamaha DTXpress/DTXplorer/DTXtreme

The message you received, is an example of a Challenge/Response spam
protection system. A definition and descriptive article can be found
here:

http://tinyurl.com/3h4ez [email.about.com link]

Here's an excerpt from the article:

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How Challenge/Response Spam Filters Work

Spam comes from spammers. Combine this simple truth, a tautology almost,
with its counterpart ("good mail comes from known senders") and you have
the idea behind challenge/response spam filtering software and services.
The Theory

Good mail comes from the senders you know -- your friends, your family,
the publisher of an email newsletter you have subscribed to. For all
other mail, it's safe to assume that it is spam.

Accordingly, challenge/response filters do not try to filter out the spam
but look for mail from trusted senders (senders on your so-called "white
list") and let it through. Everything else is thought to be spam and
quarantined. This makes for a fantastic spam detection rate.

But what about the occasional message from somebody not yet on your white
list who is not a spammer? What about the mail from an old friend, from a
newsletter you have just signed up for, what about if somebody changes
their email address?

Challenge/response filters take care of these situations automatically,
too. Every new sender is mailed a challenge. If they respond to the
challenge, the sender is automatically put on your white list, the
original message is recovered and you can communicate with the now
trusted sender unhampered.

Usually, the challenge consists in solving a captcha. Captchas are tasks
that are trivial for humans but highly complex and expensive to solve for
computers.

Since spammers deliver their emails to millions of email addresses, they
can't solve all the captchas "by hand", but they can't have computers
answer them either. Senders of legit mail can respond to the challenge
easily, however. Thus, their mail gets through while the spam is trashed.
------------------ CLIP -----------------

In short, whenever someone signs up for one of these services, and then
joins a mailing list (like ours here) they can "flood" the board with
challenge response emails like the one you saw (this depends on how the
board is configured i.e. reply goes to board or reply goes to sender and
how fast the moderators are at banning people! :) )

Not so much evil as annoying/rude/n00b for a person to activate and not
closely monitor the result. The other ethical problem I have with it is
that it offloads the responsibility of determining what is and is not
spam to the *sender*. Seems backwards. Why force *me* to determine what
is and is not spam for *you*? Anyway, I'm on quite a few other boards
where people have activated this type of filter and been heavily
chastised for the resulting mess on the mailinglist.

I reccomend you stick to bayesian filters for spam detection, they work
very well. :)

Vern

PS: For info on bayesian filters go here:
http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html

-- 
Vern Graner CNE/CNA/SSE    | "If the network is down, then you're
Senior Systems Engineer    | obviously incompetent so why are we
Texas Information Services | paying you? Of course, if the network
http://www.txis.com        | is up, then we obviously don't need
Austin Office 512 328-8947 | you, so why are we paying you?" VLG




Stephanie Ellison said:
>> Steph,
>>
>> I've received the exact message in my yahoo box as owner of this
>> group. I simply ignored it (I get a huge amount of junk mail and spam
>> everyday; since it can't be posted on the board, it comes to me).
>> Just in case you were wondering, no one by that address is a member
>> of this group.
>
> Just as I thought, which is why I wouldn't post directly to that e-mail
> address.
>
> Stephanie