what's up with this? "My spam filter requires verification of your email address"

[Kraniac]

I get these spam filter verifications challenges things once in a while.

One today was associated with an item I'm selling on Craigslist.

A guy sent me a few emails saying he was interested in the item..another mail that made me a $ offer.

I sent 2 responses to him, which he recieved, and on my 3rd response I got a mail from his system a few minutes later saying " My spam filter requires verification of your email address"

Then the usual stuff about "challenge / response spam protection.

The mail was associated with a website called Inbox.com

I'm always suspicious about these things. I'm using a yahoo mail address for my Craig listing.

Can anyone offer up some wisdom here. Got these things before and I never do any clicking.

[modelamac]

Using your Yahoo webpage, respond that the email he sends get through, and you are able to respond. It's good enough for you.

He can make a rule to have his spam filter accept your yahoo address.

What bothers me is that this did not come up until the 3rd email. Why no problems with the first 2? I wouldn't bite.

[Gareth]

Challenge / Response is the only spam control that is 100% effective (albeit, mildly annoying for the sender).

But it's odd that you didn't get the challenge/response e-mail until the third e-mail. Don't know what to say about that.

Some may say that the recipient may miss e-mails with a challenge/response system, since the e-mail aren't delivered until the sender is verifed. But at least the sender knows the recipient didn't get the e-mail and won't get it until they verify themselves.

Using filters, the sender will never know if, for example, Gmail puts their e-mail in the spam folder, and the recipient may not regularly (or ever) check their spam folder for legit e-mails (this happened to me with an important e-mail to a relatively new Gmail account that wasn't getting a lot of e-mail in general, let alone spam).

I personally use: http://www.spamarrest.com/

I'll admit, I still on occasion get an e-mail that could be considered spam, but at least I know that there's a physical person behind it, and they are always for legit products (usually from companies I've actually done business with), and if I want, I can still manually block them for the future.

[ho'ard]

First two times from webmail, 3rd time from browser?
Nothing suspicious about this stuff, just annoying.

[Kraniac]

All the mails were sent and received from the yahoo page. No mail program in between. I felt like i was fished and marked. No biggy, I went to yahoo and did the challenge . Haven't heard back. Obviously, it's a throwaway e-mail account so it's no huge matter. Just was curious about the oddball pattern.