[ILUG] anti-spam thing...

[Wesley Darlington]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 09:59:03AM -0800, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Breathnach, Proinnsias (Dublin) (breatpro at exchange.ie.ml.com):
> > * Send a simulated MAILER-DAEMON daemon "bounce" to known spammers in
> > hopes that they will think your email address is invalid and remove
> > you from their spam lists.
> 
> Doesn't work.  The economics of mailing spam pretty much precludes them
> from maintaining their lists of addresses:  Their strategy is to send
> out incredible numbers of copies to every address they can grab,
> arranged so as to evade consequences (including bounces), and hope to
> earn a marginal living from the few "hits".

How do spammers get their "hits" though? If the email addresses never
work, websites mentioned in the emails are perpetually down, fax and phone 
numbers go unanswered... What's a gal that wants to reply to some spam
to do?

The shady world of spam intrigues me ... do spammers actually make money? 
Can they possibly be as stupid as they seem? Do they really exist, 
or are they just a conspiracy by some shady telco cartel? Ditto the
Usenet cabal? Has anybody here every met a real, live spammer? (***)

> > * Complain to the "upstream providers" of known spammers or spam
> > sites/domains, asking that they disconnect the internet service of the
> > spammers.
> 
> This tends to work, for upstream connections that aren't spam-harbours.
> It's an endless game of whack-a-mole, though.

While I hate spammers (*), I find the existence of spammers slightly 
reassuring: it proves that it *is* still possible to engage in conduct
on the 'net that is disapproved of; it demonstrates that there are parts 
of the 'net where people with something to hide can hide.

Then again, sometimes I wonder if spam isn't just a conspiracy by the
Internet Cabal to make me /think/ that there are bits of the net where
one can do ... unpopular things. Hmmmm.

:-),
Wesley.


(*) I really, really hate spammers. And I hate spam. I'll be the first
injecting <insert slow-acting, excruciatingly painful poison here> into
spam and force-feeding it to the spammers when the revolution comes.  (**)

(**) I also hate snail mail spam. It only dawned on me recently that I
could deal with it by marking it "return to sender" and dropping it into
a handy postbox. It's too early to notice the effects, but I'm hopeful.
Anybody got any thoughts on this?

(***) And what did you do to said spammer? Plenty of gory details please.