I got one of these once from a person who I was buying something from. Its a pain in the ass and you have to wonder how much it is worth to you. I mean as in instapundit’s case, it meant they didn’t get a response from him. In my case I still went through the whole process because I was making flight reservations and needed to do it right then. There was a significant amount of time wasted sending multiple emails.
Look I get spam, you get spam, we all get spam together. I get junk mail in my mail box at home too. Probably about 40% of it is junk. But I don’t refuse all mail, or even all 3rd class mail, to get away from it. I just throw it away.
It is rude because it says that my need to communicate with you is less important than your need to avoid spam. If you think that way, maybe I don’t want to talk to you so much.
UPDATE: After talking to my oh so bright office mate we found even more ways this sucks. What if two people with this system email each other.
A mails B. B’s super-duper-spaminator sends a confirm email to A. A’s super-duper-spaminator send’s a confirm email to B. If the filters are smart they just swallow email from address they are already waiting on. Otherwise they send another email in response to the confirm and you have a loop.
Either way, neither person gets a response from the person they want to communicate with.
How do these people sign up for mailing lists? They send a request to join the spamfighter’s email list. spamfighter sends a confirm email, which gets bounced by super-duper-spaminator, with out the person getting the chance to see it, therefore not getting added to the list.
This applies to all kinds of responses. My office mate said he gets bounce messages like this in response to people signing up for his shareware program via eSellerate. Now the person doesn’t get their serial number and has to email the author to get it. But the author is going to annoyed and maybe not even take the time to jump through the hoops of the super-duper-spaminator.