How does "Confirmation Sent" work? (CS column)

[--VQ--]

Question:

The Held Mail folder has a column labeled CS with entries "Yes" or "No". What's this?

Answer:

CS stands for "Confirmation Sent". It tells you if a challenge was actually sent to the address claimed by the sender. In early 2006, we began suppressing confirmation letters for mail that is clearly spam. Spammers often hide behind the address of an innocent victim - or a Honeypot address (more about Honeypots below)...

Of course, if you have disabled the checkbox "Sender Responds to Confirmation", then challenges are not sent at all. That setting on your preferences screen has priority over this indicator. So in this case, the CS column simply indicates which messages would have been challenged, if the feature were enabled.

Why Suppress Confirmations?

Before we added the selective suppression of confirmation letters, some ISPs would periodically delete your sender confirmation letters without alerting their users. That's because they subscribe to one or more blacklist services which added our challenge server to their "bad-behavior" listing. These services claim to identify known spammers based on their mailing patterns.

Should your challenge be considered spam? That's an interesting question. If someone knocks at your door, it is certainly reasonable to call out "Who's there?". But according to these black list companies, the servers that send challenges are guilty of going up to the doors of unintended 3rd parties and yelling "Who's There". That is, they feel that we are sending your confirmation letters to the wrong people and so they classify the challege server as a spammer.

ISPs that use these services typically compare incoming mail to several of these black lists (there are dozens of them). Our server gets on various blacklists from time to time, because spammers trick us into sending confirmation letters to Honeypot addresses.

What are Honeypots?

Honeyots are fake addresses that are placed in web pages across the internet for the purpose of attracting the address harvesting robots of spammers (also called web crawlers or 'bots'). The addresses are often invisible to visitors or they have a statement such as: "Don't click here. This address is here only to lure address-harvesting robots". The Honeypot theory says that fake people don't have friends. Therefore, legitimate senders should never send mail to these addresses.

Unfortunatey, spammers search out these honeypot addresses and intentionally send as if they were the rightful owners. That is, they use it as their "From" address. Other spammers use the addresses of innocent 3rd parties -- people who never wrote to you. In both cases, this chicanery causes our mail server to seem like a spammer, because it is our task to send confirmation letters to the apparent sender.

The balcklists usually list our challenge server for a brief period (several hours), and it usually doesn't affect the acceptance of our mail at ISPs, unless three or more blacklist our IP address at the same time (there are dozens of these around the world - and typically, an ISP will use three or four of them and block sending servers that are on a majority of the ones they compare).

We are working very hard to minimize the chance of getting onto these Honeypot-blacklists. This month, we will begin SUPRESSING challeges to about 90% of all Held Mail. That's because we will have the technology to be certain that the mail is most aggregious of spam or phishing scams, and therefore - we needn't risk sending the confirmation back to an innocent party or a honeypot address.

What if I see a valid message that was not challenged?"

If you see a message in your Held Mail folder that you do not consider spam, and if the "CS" column at the right says "No" it means that our challenge suppression feature has goofed - and avoided challenging what it thought was certain spam. This concerns us greatly. We would very much appreciate your sending the entire email including headers. Open a support ticket, and paste the entire message into the report window. Please mention this forum article. It is vanquish.com/cs.

[jdmarch]

The CS column is not showing in the Held Mail list. Is this intentional? If so, I request that you reconsider your decision.

I had CS disabled for several weeks, now I'm experimenting with it, would have expected to see the CS column at least now.

Thanks.

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*** UPDATE, next morning - this has been fixed. Thanks!

[czyler]

How do i turn this back on? It is not showing on my held mail. I would be useful to see the spam scores.

[--VQ--]

vqME is currently challenging *all* messages that are not otherwise passed to the IN Box. That's because we are still experimenting with the set points for sending or suppressing the challenge. (Incidentally, we are also working on enahancements to the filter release mechanism in an effort to dramtically increase the number of released messages with high accuracy).

We will re-introduce the CS column whenever we selectively suppress the challenges to any sender. But for now, it is shown only to vqNow users - for whom the challenge is suppressed on a great many messages.

Important Reminder: "CS" stands for Challenge Sent and not for Challenge Suppressed! (I grimmace - when I contemplate our poor choice of abbreviations).