Spam solution

[Moohooya]

I have a great idea to rid the world of spam (for ppl with high speed connections only)

Spam gets marked as spam, just as it does now. If this is automatic, great, otherwise, go ahead and do it manually as you currently do. All spam then gets put into a mailbox.

Then, for each new item of spam, send every item of mail in the spam box to the spammer, along with the following message

Dear Spammer,

I wish to inform you that I am not interested in whatever product you are trying to sell me. However, please find the attached offer from another spammer, that you may be interested in.

Yours,

Anonymous


PS, sorry I didn?t use my real email address, but I feel that sending my real email address to a spammer is asking for more spam. If you?d prefer not to get any other offers from other spammers, then don?t email me any more spam. Not sure how you can achieve this since you do not know who I am, but I face the same dilemma dealing with spam!


If enough people with high speed connections start doing this, spammers will never be able to find the sale amoungst the spam they recieve, and so find themselves a more meaningful job in life.

Technically this is NOT spam, since contact was innitiated by the spammer, so I don't beileve this violates any email account usage, or anti-spam laws. Just to save on bandwidth, the spam box should have some limit, say 50-100 email messages.

Now since more and more spam actually has no return email address, but just has a url, a process could run making a large number of request from that url. To avoid any denial of service allogations, the program could be trying to do something useful, but just amazing inefficient, like look for an unsubscribe page, but be so buggy that everytime it find a new page it re-reads all known pages again. Or perhaps, re-walk the whole site as soon as it has finished, just in-case the site has been updated, looking for a comments, or suggestions form where the suggestion "please don't send spam" can be submitted. To be sure it is not a purely a denial of service, a phone number or address can be entered (rather than an email), so the spammer can contact you to get your email address and remove it from their list if they choose to.

It would annoy me if I received 50-100 items of spam from 1% of the million people I just spammed, or if I had a web site and was paying for bandwidth, and 1% of the people I just spammed started eating all my ISPs bandwidth for (valid) reasons that don't put money in my pocket, and my bill went through the roof. I might even stop spamming!

So what do you all think?

 

[minendo]

In no way does that solve the situation with spam. Instead it creates more spam.

 

[Cuda1447]

 

[Abhi]

Arent spammer "reply-to" addresses normally false?

Even if you get the spammers true email id.... cant the spammer just not check his email? i.e.... just send mails from a certain account... and never bother looking into the inbox..

 

[konichiwa]

I think he's going for something like this but I'm not sure

 

[fs5]

I thought usually spam emails don't use reply-to's as their main sales address... the email itself usually redirects you to a webpage or something.

 

[Moohooya]

Yes, konichiwa got it. The idea is some automated way to "attack" the spammers, so they are flooded with responses and are unable to remain productive and profitable.

Just deleting spam doesn't solve spam. The spammers can continue sending it. We need to make spam an ineffective way to market stuff. The easiest way to do this is to make it hard for the spammer to weed out the sale from non sales. Now this needs to be done in a way that your email address is not given out, as verified email addresses are worth more, and this will just cause more spam.

As several people pointer out, most spam these days come from bugus email addresses. However, there is always some form of contact, or else how would the spammer get the money? It is this contact that needs to be attacked. As slashdot said, if 1% of people respond, the spammers would be drowned in responses. If an automated way can be created to place this response, then it should not be hard to get 1+% responses.

 

[StageLeft]

The way to solve spam is similar to the way I'm not getting calls from telemarketers anymore. Make it freaking illegal on a do not fvcking spam me list.

Of course, the problem is that unlike those calls which originate from the US for US businesses (for the most part) spam can be worldwide. It can be easily enforcable for charging a US company for spamming from out of country, but it's difficult to counter spam from outside the US which is marketing for a US country. I suppose that could be one benefit of the UN taking over the internet! Course, any non-UN country will just be a host to spammers, so in that way we'd have to lock out anybody not part of the UN from being able to send emails to a UN specific email address. Perhaps skoorb@whatever.com.UN would work!

 

[SagaLore]

You must realize that all the spam sender addresses are either fake, or block return email. You'd just be creating a DoS attack on the Internet.

 

[Skyclad1uhm1]

A good spam solution would be to put the death penalty on spammers and let the FBI and CIA actively hunt them down and kill them.

 

[TofBnT]