Hello, for those of you who haven't heard from me before, I'm Drew Dunn, one
of the listowners of PCBUILD and PCSOFT.  It's been a long time since I've
posted anything to either of the lists, but I do read all of the messages
that come through them.

This message is aimed at those of you who use Earthlink as your ISP.   One
of the new features of that Earthlink has announced is a challenge/response
email security system.  This is designed to significantly cut down on the
amount of spam that your may be receiving.

The way that a challenge/response email system works is that if somebody
sends you an email and they are not on your "whitelist" (a list of  people
that you will accept email from), they will receive an email from  Earthlink
with information on how to enable you to receive emails from them.
Typically, it means that this person will have to send back an email with
some sort of code in it.  The idea behind this is that almost all spam is
sent with invalid return email addresses.  Thus, when those authentication
emails are sent out, if there is no real email address to receive them,
you'll never see the spam.  Just in case you're wondering what happens if
you send an email to somebody who uses a challenge/response system and
you're not on their whitelist and they're not on yours, anyone you send
email to automatically gets added to your whitelist.

Now, to the subject of this message.

Part of the problem with challenge/response email systems is that they don't
interact with mailing lists very well.  If PCBUILD or PCSOFT is not on your
whitelist, Earthlink will generate a response back to the mailing list.
Unfortunately, there isn't any way for the mailing list to respond back to
this kind of message.  And, although one of the moderators will see the
message, there isn't any way for them to reply back to it on behalf of the
mailing list.  The unfortunate end for you is that you'll stop receiving
PCBUILD and PCSOFT email messages.  Fortunately there is a solution.

All you need to do is add [log in to unmask] and/or
[log in to unmask] to your challenge/response whitelist.

Neither Bob nor I use Earthlink, so we can't tell you exactly how to do
that, but you should be able to find information regarding this feature at
Earthlink's support site at http://support.earthlink.net.  Also, the
challenge/response system is an optional, voluntary feature.  You have to
turn it on to make it work.  Just remember that when you do, you need to
make sure that PCBUILD and PCSOFT are in your whitelist.

There are other ISPs and web-based email services that use
challenge/response email systems and these instructions are valid for them
as well.  We have seen several messages in the past from them and,
unfortunately, our only recourse was to delete the accounts from the
listserver when the authentication responses started coming in.  Don't let
this happen to you!

If you have any questions, please email me directly at [log in to unmask]
Please don't reply to the mailing list.

Thanks,

Drew Dunn
The NOSPIN Group

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