More False Positives

In spam filtering a false positive is when valid mail is incorrectly identified as junk and you loose valid email.  I find it frustrating and I'm not the only one. Marketing Guru Seth Godin has discovered that he's loosing google checkout orders to the gmail spam filter and that notes he sent to internship candidates didn't get through. His conclusion:

Stopping spam is a worthless endeavor when you also stop non-spam.

Tolerating some noise and shoplifting and cranky customers is part of the deal. Better to be too open than too closed, I think.

Tonsho takes a different tack - every new contact is challenged to authenticate as human. Is this a slight hassle? Yes. Is it better to know that someone who genuine wants to contact you can? I think so.

Lets assume that both Seth and his interns were using Tonsho. Probably the interns would have emailed Seth their application first and received a challenge.  Would they have bother to authenticate?  Absolutely!  When you send outbound mail, the addressee is pre-authenticated, so Seth's reply would have breezed through without any problems.

Giving users the opportunity to prove they are genuine means that your mail can come through and that's essential.