Spam the spammers!

May 28, 2002 12:09 PM

In response to email-harvesters, how about implementing this as an invisiible link on each metafilter page. It generates an unlimited stream of bogus email addresses, thereby poluting the email list. Spam the spammers!
posted by signal to Feature Requests at 12:09 PM (20 comments total)

it's no longer a problem, as email harvesters will never see anyone's email address on the site again. You have to be a logged in member to view email addresses.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 12:26 PM on May 28, 2002

It's getting so out of hand.
posted by Voyageman at 12:28 PM on May 28, 2002

I was thinking of it more as a public service, since I'm sure MF gets a zillion email harvesters every day, this would add some serious noise to their lists.
posted by signal at 12:35 PM on May 28, 2002

while i'm thankful that only members can see my e-mail, i have recently been hit by a few waves of crap. Sadly, I'm sure that fellow members are spamming. How sad.
posted by BlueTrain at 12:35 PM on May 28, 2002

Sadly, I'm sure that fellow members are spamming.

I just don't buy it. everyone I know battles spam, and most of them don't post here.
posted by rebeccablood at 1:29 PM on May 28, 2002

signal: such 'activism' does more harm than good. Just as someone, somewhere, must pay for the bandwidth, energy, and administrative & end-user manhours that spammers steal; someone, somewhere, will pay for the resources consumed by email addresses sent to non-existent addresses.

The spammers see to it that these costs never come out of their own pockets, you may be sure. It costs them no more, not even in time, to send to a list with 90% bad addresses as one that's 90% good.
posted by Sapphireblue at 1:51 PM on May 28, 2002

This kind of reminds me of the guy in the Air Force who found out the system administrators had installed event loggers on all the PCs where he worked (this was a few years ago). So he made a little macro to constantly close and open Solitaire. After just a few days, the server storing the logs ran out of hard disk space. WPoison seems to operate on a similar principle.

It costs them no more, not even in time, to send to a list with 90% bad addresses as one that's 90% good.

Isn't that kind of the point? In order for their spamming to remain effective, they will have to output twice the spam (costing them some resources). Won't they?

It seems like a good idea to me.

I just don't buy it. everyone I know battles spam, and most of them don't post here.

It wouldn't be that hard for a member to set up a script which would roll through the member pages and grab email addresses.

All of that being said, I don't think it should be put on MetaFilter, since the email addresses are protected, and I wonder what strain this would put on the server. (just a curiosity, I have no idea)
posted by insomnyuk at 2:06 PM on May 28, 2002

More to the point is that there are people out there who respond to spam. If people didn't respond, sales people would stop doing it, wouldn't they?

I think it's probably all your grandmother's fault. You should find out how many X10 cameras bottles of online Viagra she's bought.

Only you can prevent spam.
posted by crunchland at 2:10 PM on May 28, 2002

In order for their spamming to remain effective, they will have to output twice the spam (costing them some resources). Won't they?

I think that would only hold true if their business expenses weren't negligible in the first place. It's *extremely* cost-effective to send spam; that's why it's attractive.

Two times almost nothing is still almost nothing.
posted by Sapphireblue at 2:45 PM on May 28, 2002

I've recently replaced all the mailtos on my site with one, central email page featuring my address as a GIF. It's irritating, but seems the only way to stop the harvest. I think that the spammers might use metafilter to collect URLs, then crawl those for mailtos. I even noticed in my logs that some suspicious spiders were searching for anything that began "mailto&", which defeats the trick of tying your mailto as ascii to get rid of the @ and the .

And some of those spiders were referred by Metafilter.
posted by evanizer at 3:18 PM on May 28, 2002

...which defeats the trick of tying your mailto...

That should read: "...which defeats the trick of typing your mailto..."
posted by evanizer at 3:19 PM on May 28, 2002

All but the most ancient and decrepit of the harvesters are varying degrees of immune to wpoison now, and have been for a couple of years.


posted by majick at 5:00 PM on May 28, 2002

I'm sick of it too. The best solution that I've come up with for an actual clickable email button (as opposed to writing it out in some obfuscated way) is to embed the link in a Flash file. As far as I know, there aren't spiders scouring Flash files...so it seems like a good idea. Of course, if the user doesn't have Flash it's kind of useless... but that's very minor.
posted by mkn at 6:13 PM on May 28, 2002

Money is all these guys know. Establish a service charge at the ISP to deliver e-mail to any address. Let the recipient waive the charge (and absorb the actual cost, if any, of receiving the mail) for selected addresses (friends, known businesses, etc.). All other addresses have to pay before the mail is delivered. Cost per message set by the ISP. Make the use of false return addresses for business purposes an expensive crime.
posted by pracowity at 1:55 AM on May 29, 2002

Pracowity, the problem is that not charging to deliver mail is the default, and as long as there were ISPs that didn't switch over to that system the spammers would simply work around the problem by finding those ISPs.

I'd like to see a change in the Internet email architecture: instead of transmitting the entire message, MTAs would send only the headers. These body-less messages would show up in your inbox as they do now, but when you decided you wanted to read them, your client would send a request for the rest of the message back down the received-path. Only then would the message data actually be transmitted.

This could be built on top of the current Internet mail system; you'd have to have a client that supported it, of course, and ISPs would have to update their copies of Sendmail or qmail to use this new feature, but two important things would happen. First, you'd always be able to trace a message back to its source - you'd HAVE to be able to trace a message back, because otherwise there'd be no way of retrieving the message data. Second, neither you nor anybody else would waste bandwidth transferring spam around unless (for who knows what reason!) you actually decided to read it.

What this would really do is set a point past which spammers could not upgrade. They'd simply keep using the old system - but as more legitimate users switched over, the temptation to simply stop carrying old-style messages would grow.

-Mars
posted by Mars Saxman at 8:08 AM on May 29, 2002

These body-less messages would show up in your inbox as they do now, but when you decided you wanted to read them, your client would send a request for the rest of the message back down the received-path.

But wouldn't spammers just make the headers more user-friendly at that point? Instead of "rape-sex", they would use "hi" or "i missed you" or some other attention-getting comment.

The only solution I can perceive is to pay for e-mail sent. Just a tiny cost, like a penny, nickel, or dime per message to weed out the asses. I truly hate this idea, but I can see no other way to avoid them.
posted by BlueTrain at 8:17 AM on May 29, 2002

If any connection came with some reasonable number of free outgoing emails, and then you had to pay extra for extra ones - like you said, just a small amount - that would probably help to cut spam back, and not be too annoying for the rest of us.
posted by mdn at 8:41 AM on May 29, 2002

Mars, at first glance your idea is a very cool one: keep spam at bay unless it's specifically downloaded, and make every MTA responsbile for the messages that emit from it. The problem is, your idea breaks some fundamental advantages of the way email works now, particularly the one where a sender and receiver don't have to be able to reach each other so long as an intermediary MTA exists.

Mail's inherent insecurity is also one of its big advantages. It can work in configurations where a more rigid system would not, such as UUCP delivery, firewalled networks, or multiple redundant paths.

Not to mention, heuristic filters like Spamassassin or Vipul's Razor depend on having the body of the message in hand and both are more effective than simple header filtering especially when combined with good host blacklists.
posted by majick at 1:11 PM on May 29, 2002

Thanks for the link to spamassassin, majick. I'm going to see about hooking that into my procmail system.
posted by Mars Saxman at 3:56 PM on May 29, 2002

Do links like this really help stop spam? Or is it just another scam?
posted by sheauga at 7:58 PM on May 29, 2002