DoS spammers?

January 22, 2002 5:09 AM

Exist-there some clever way to direct e-mail back to an offensive spammer so that they will get the message; something like a denial of service attack/overload? The spam is really getting to me these days

(and yes, it has to be legal, or I won't do it)
posted by ParisParamus to General Weblog-Related at 5:09 AM (10 comments total)

If there were some automatic (legal or illegal) way to do that, and to do it so that it bothered the spammer more than the spam recipient, wouldn't everyone be doing it?

To stop spam, you have to ban or charge for unsolicited mass e-mailings for commercial gain (and maybe ban or charge for the use of fake sending addresses for commercial gain). Otherwise, spam will never go away.
posted by pracowity at 6:05 AM on January 22, 2002

spams tend to come from invalid/inactive email addresses, so theres not usually much you can do about throwing juice back in the other direction
posted by sawks at 7:50 AM on January 22, 2002

Seems like there was something here once about setting up a fake thinger that would go back to the spammer, making their evil machine take you off the list because they think your address is invalid?
posted by Mack Twain at 9:12 AM on January 22, 2002

Spam is defeatable. Here's what I do — I have my mail server hold mail from unknown addresses until they reply to its autoreply. I get no spam at all (although I get the occasional UCE from a human — maybe one every three or four days), and no-one has ever complained about the minor one-time inconvenience.

I'll be at the NYC GTG if anyone wants to grill me on how this works, or wants advice on setting it up.
posted by nicwolff at 10:40 AM on January 22, 2002

Apparently "Mail" in Mac OS X can do this - some sort of a magical bounce command. I wish my mailreader of choice could do it. I don't need to lose any weight, super-size my genitals, or get out of debt fast, thank you very much.
posted by D at 10:40 AM on January 22, 2002

I believe that Brad L Graham (the most popular weblogger alive TM) has a fantastic spam filter. I don't know if he makes it publicly available. Brad?

[just a note: typos in the above originally included calling brad "Bard" and the "most popular weblogger alove"--and then "poopular" in this aside]
posted by rebeccablood at 10:54 AM on January 22, 2002

Bard L Graham! The Most Poopular Weblogger Alove!
posted by Succa at 3:01 PM on January 22, 2002

the os x mail client does indeed have a 'bounce to sender' feature

but 95% of the time using it on spam just gets you a bounce of your own - from your outgoing mail server telling you the spammers address is invalid

posted by sawks at 3:03 PM on January 22, 2002

I've been kickin' around this idea for a while now:

what if someone maintained a list of e-mails of folks that are known spammers, work for advertising companies that send out spam (not their personal addresses, unless you really wanted to be nasty and you probably should), and/or distribute address lists and other such tools? and everytime you got a piece of spam, you forwarded a copy to all the people on the list? give'm a taste of their own medicene, says me!

what do y'all think?
posted by mcsweetie at 11:28 PM on January 22, 2002

For some reason, the spam has increased 10x in the last few weeks; or did I visit the wrong Website recently?
posted by ParisParamus at 2:46 PM on January 23, 2002