Some background: Last week Amir Lev posted an attention-grabbing blog on Computerworld that posed some interesting questions that have surrounded challenge-response email protection systems for years, but didn’t quite grasp the whole story on how this technology really operates today.

The blog entry in its entirety can be found here.  We touched on this in an entry last week, but there is still some valuable ground to cover.

We won't make the argument here that challenge-response technology is the be-all end-all of email security (that goes against the philosophy of this blog, and the philosophy of this writer) – but it is far from the apocalyptic solution Lev describes and a huge step up from many of the “anti-spam” solutions on the market today.

When challenge-response technology is implemented properly it can be a valuable tool within a comprehensive email security solution – a mechanism to support a powerful dynamic whitelist, not a clunky auto-responder that ushers emails into an abyss.

Here we dive deeper into the shakiest parts of Lev's argument in a short series touching on some of the most common myths surrounding CR technologies…