[plug] [link] Please start using this

[Leon Brooks]

On Sunday 02 February 2003 02:44 pm, Peter J. Nicol wrote:
> Is there any evidence at all that this works?  ie, that spammers will
> respond in the way that the email suggest?  Are there any success stories?

The results would be a bit difficult to trace.

> Sounds like a huge waste of time and resources to me.  Like a spammer cares
> if an email address is wrong.  They don't run mail servers, they steal
> them, or use throwaway accounts on free servers.

Yes, the author says that in various places. The idea is to dilute their 
database of addresses so that they're spitting out enormous amounts of mail 
to rubbish addresses, thus raising the cost *to*the*spammer* of doing 
business, and also to raise the level of spam, for however brief a while, in 
the spammers' own mailboxes.

I would be tempted to add the following:

 * An engine to follow the spam links, fish email addresses from them,
   and seed the pages with those (so the spammer winds up spamming their
   own and other spammers' customers);

 * An engine to pull email addresses from the sites and lists of security
   agencies like the FBI, Mossad, US Homeland Security, Army, Navy,
   Airforce, etc, people who can get annoyed about spam in a very
   effective way and perhaps even go and knock down^H^H^H^Hon some doors;

 * Trace back the spam to the calling host (both on scan and on reciept
   of spam) in realtime, scan that and its ISP for adresses, and add
   those - and keep a list of them in a central place so that webservers
   and SMTP agents around the world could block them for a couple of
   days (years, if they offend persistently) or otherwise deal with them;

 * I'd love to find some sneakier ways of getting spam looped back to
   its sender, the old postmaster at 127.0.0.1 trick only sneakier
   (postmaster at 127.*.*.* should work if they're sending from XP and have
   SMTP up).

Cheers; Leon