Paul Altman in PCWorld: “I read about challenge/response and thought this was the ultimate solution to get rid of all spam. Anyone is welcome to e-mail you, but they have to be a human being.”

Altman’s reality was quite different. “People were writing to me, and I was never getting the messages,” he says. “I asked them, and they weren’t getting the challenges.”

Altman’s ISPs treated the challenges as spam. Nobody got them, so nobody responded. No response, no mail.

Interestingly the offending ISPs were Earthlink and AOL, the owner of Mailblocks, the service that abused Altman. His complaints collided with AOL’s World Famous Customer Response, so he bailed.

AOL claims it’s fixed. Altman: “Is not.”

See for yourself at PCWorld.