I once implemented a similar system on a Mercury mailserver and PegasusMail mailreader. Not so sophisticated as you are planning, but similar in idea: a "human" must send back a response to the challenge issued by the mailserver before mail was allowed through.

The amount of abuse this has generated was appaling. Few of the people who mailed me even read my friendly message asking them to send an email to a certain address to verify they were not spammers. Most of them took heavy umbrage of their precious emails not being allowed in without further ado. I finally discarded this system for a classic automated filtering approach.

So be prepared that few users will appreciate your efforts.

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law

In reply to Re: Writing a script for a mailserver by CountZero
in thread Writing a script for a mailserver by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.