Spam Retaliation

BigLar

Senior member
Jun 22, 2003
683
0
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I suspect that, by now, everyone just tired of being bombarded by offers for drugs, watches, and so forth. I got to thinking about the idea of making e-mail accounts wait a second or so between e-mails in order to make it too slow for the spammers to succeed. I don't know if it will ever happen, but how about this variant:

Witihin your e-mail reader, reporting something as spam would result in a long-missive explaining that you prefer not to be spammed, presumably utilizing the same techniques that they use; gifs, nonsense words and dialogs, random titles, etc. to prevent your reply from being automatically discarded. If a substantial fraction of the mails returned were thus, would they not have a mountain of garbage to pick through to get to the suckers that actually reply?

Sort of a communal denial-of-service, but each sender only sends once. Could it work or would it be too spread over time?
 

I don't understand what you're trying to say.

So you want to make your client pause between retreiving emails from the server? I don't think that will make a difference in the amount of spam you receive.

On your second idea, I take it that you want to send a response for each spam you send? Seeing as how many spams are sent from compromised systems, dummy terminals and other tricks of their trade I don't see how sending back emails would make a difference to them.
The only thing it will accomplish is making your retrieval of emails slower and clogging your ISPs (or whoever you use for email) server and bandwidth.
 

DaveSimmons

Elite Member
Aug 12, 2001
40,730
670
126
Usually spam "reply-to" and other information is forged.

We get at least a half-dozen "mail delivery failed" emails at work from spam emails sent using our domain name in the reply-to field (that were not sent by us).
 

ttown

Platinum Member
Oct 27, 2003
2,412
0
0
my linux hosted website a couple years ago had been having attempts made to use a formmail.pl script weakness.
I didn't know it until I moved hosts and could actually see the access logs -- so i don't know how long it had been going on. Anyway, I noticed many, MANY attempts every couple days.
So, i replaced the formmail.pl (and other similarly named mail script access attempts) with one of my own writing that effectively took 4 1/2 minutes to respond with a http response page. Within a couple days, no more requests!
Haven't seen them since.... so i guess it was effective. (Or maybe they just quit doing it... I can't really tell)
 

TallBill

Lifer
Apr 29, 2001
46,017
62
91
I get zero spam in either of my email accounts.. Havn't recieved any in years.
 

trinketsummoner

Senior member
Aug 24, 2004
695
1
81
I can see the OPs point. If someone is spamming you, there has to be money in it for them. Its not a return email you want though, its the link to the site in the email itself. I think the way people will go eventually is only accept email you positively want ie If you arent on my list, your email doesnt get through.
 

Lonyo

Lifer
Aug 10, 2002
21,938
6
81
Try spamming an email addy on that address with 10MB attachments, and get as many people as possible to. Might clog up their inbox.
 

Quasmo

Diamond Member
Jul 7, 2004
9,630
1
76
I wish email programs had photo recognition software in them so you could say: any email that looks similar to this, delete it. Because the problem now is that spammers change the image url so you cant block that img. If they used the same image twice this would block it.