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You're exactly right. I've been running Spam Vampire 24/7 for quite some time now (1-2 years). Works great. Quit bitching and do something about it!

This is sort of similar to the concept of spam vampire...

http://www.hillscapital.com/antispam/

I have nothing against the site. I, too, have run the Lad Vampire on occasion. Haven't tried Spam Research tool or others much yet, though.

I always have the Spam Vampire script running on one machine that I don't pay for bandwith on. The whole point of the script is to run up their bandwidth bills without doing a DOS attack on the site. I'd like to think that I've helped contribute my own little part. I end up eating up about 10 gig of bandwidth a day.

2 words: Spam Vampire
It works if you tke the time to do it. I got all of my friends together and we made a collective one. We hit some sites so badly that they are DoSd.

Obviously you should not be publishing referrers unless you have a way to filter them (see other comments), but since you *are* getting spammed, you could take a moment out to fight back a bit; e.g., you can run up the spammer's bandwidth charges.

If your server gets spammed like mine does and you get unsolicited spam like I do, set up a SpamVampire. Check out the one on my site. (Mad props to this guy for writing it.)

Running up their hosting costs is an effective means of reducing spam.

All the attention focused on who sends the spam and how, and from where it comes, leads nowhere.

Filtering, if you get really good at it, keeps your inbox fairly clean but does nothing about the huge volumes of spam flying around the Internet.

The only tactics that have hurt spammers are those that have increased the costs of the sponsoring Websites. The Lycos screen saver was delicious but failed because it depended on a central server and because a bunch of complete nitwits clucked and wrung their hands over the appropriateness or lack of same in hammering spamvertized Websites. Meanwhile spam continues and those same whiners do nothing meaningful about it.

The one controlling fact that seems to have escaped most of the discussion about spamfighting tactics is that almost all spam contains explicit invitations to visit sponsors' URLs. It's really that simple. If a sponsoring Website hires a spammer to send out millions of emails advertising the Website, the sponsor can't complain if millions of people accept the invitations and visit. Visitors to a Website have no obligation to buy anything.

Active spamfighting was first articulated in 2003 by Paul Graham in Filters That Fight Back. Graham is the person who popularized Bayesian filtering in 2002, about a year before he suggested that filters might actively punish the spamvertized sites they identify. To date no good tools have emerged for independent, distributed spamfighting of this type although many individuals have built scripts for using curl or wget to download files from spamvertized sites.

Until an open source, personal spamfighter is developed and released, the best way to fight back against spam is to use one of the Web-based "vampire" pages, either as maintained by someone else or customized to hit the sponsors of the spam you receive. They are called "vampires" because the suck bandwidth from the spamsites, thus increasing the costs of running spamvertized businesses.

• SpamVampire
• LadVampire downloads files from fake bank sites
• Spam Research Tool downloads files from current spamvertized sites

Any of the SpamVampire-type pages may be saved locally and modified. Once you have one of them running in your browser just right click and Save As to your desktop or other convenient place, then edit the list of sites/files at the end of the HTML page. The pages run just as well from your own hard drive as they do from servers.

Of course it's a pain in the butt to keep such an HTML page current, so there's something to be said for running someone else's updated page if it targets spamvertized sites of interest to you. LadVampire, for instance, targets fake bank sites that scam people out of millions. The Spam Research Tool is updated to target spamvertized sites and redirectors manually identified from spam received at its several hosted domains.

One of these days someone will build a bridge between the excellent URL de-obfuscation and identification contained in many of the filtering tools on the one hand and local spamsite downloaders like the SpamVampire genre. Then we'll be able to quickly and easily verify our own spamsite targets and pass the information to our own spammerhammers.

I don't know of anything which is that automatic and do not think that it is a good idea anyway. Someone sends you something which registers as a false positive and you nuke them.

Bad move. Your company will not make friends that way.

What you need is something that will attack hand-picked sites and that exists, the source is also pointed to on that page.

Be aware that it does not like Mozilla, but is fine under the konq.

One last question: all that artificial traffic will cost your company as well. Are they cool with that?

I just had an idea.

I have my own personal mail server, and I use Active Spam Killer to filter my email. (It's a challenge-response system)

Anyway, I have a cron job that deletes unconfirmed messages over 2 weeks old that were not replied to. What if it extracted all "img src=" URLs from the emails with a REGEX before deleting them, and then auto-generated a Spam Vampire page that anybody could download?

What if your mail provider did this for you? (though, they probably WOULDN'T want to do this because it would drive up their costs, too)

This is close to what you're looking for. (It's IE only, though.)

This isn't a screensaver, but it's close. (It's also non MozOperaFox compatible, but if it costs Ralsky money I'll live with IE for this one task.)

Also, on a related note, this is a little java app that you can run as a background process thath injects false information into various spam/spyware related website forms.

Go get 'em, tiger.

I had to turn off the GMX Spam filter because it was blocking messages from a mailing list I am on.

I tried marking the messages as 'not spam' based on the sender, but every single message has a different - unique - sender so that failed. To top it all, I could not even remove the 30-odd senders from the list again.

Now it is down to Mozilla's spam blocker again. It has virtually zero false-positives, but misses too many (30%) spam messages.

There are times when I'd love to have a baseball bat and a list of spammers - they are perfectly aware we do not want their garbage but they persist on finding new ways to bypass filters and dump their stuff on us. Anyone who actually wants this stuff will not have filters set anyway. Failing a baseball bat, I am about to try SpamVampire again. This sort of obnoxious antisocial behaviour demands some response.

But, I don't think it's the same kind as this guy.
Nifty little script. I keep it running 24/7, bombarding my favorite spammers. I was doing the same thing myself with a frameset, but this one is soooo much prettier!

...please allow me to pimp two of my favorite anti-spam projects. First is the Unsolicited Commando squadron. UC is a happy little Java app that sits on your desktop and spends its days merrily filling out forms on spamvertised sites with perfectly real-looking (and yet completely bogus) data. Run one on your machine and help drive another mortgage spammer out of business! The second place I'd like to point you to is a spam vampire site. This is a webpage (IE only for now, but source is available and hopefully being ported to MozFireOperaSafariFox soon) that attacks spamvertised sites and reloads their graphics over and over and over and *over* again all day long. Basically it's the Slashdot effect put to good use. Burn up a spammer's bandwidth and... well, hopefully you'll have their children out on the street and doing vile things for money before long. Enjoy!!

...but as I always do when spam stories come around, please let me pimp two of my favorite anti-spam projects. First is Unsolicited Commando. It's a happy little Java app that spends its days filling out information forms on spamvertised sites with legitimate looking (yet completely bogus) personal information. Run it on your system and help make mortgage spams more useless and expensive! Secondly, let me point you towards a spam vampire page. It's IE only for now, but the source is available and hopefully it'll be functional in other browsers soon. The page sits and reloads graphics from spam sites over and over again to burn up their bandwidth - just like Slashdot, but put to a good cause. Load it up and fight dirty just like Sanford and his bottom-feeding friends!

...allow me to pimp two of my favorite projects. First up is the Unsolicited Commando project. It's a little java app that spends its day quietly and merrily filling out forms on spamvertised websites with completely bogus - and yet totally real looking - data. It's especially effective against - surprise! - mortgage/refinance spammers, which seems to be the specialty of the dirtbag mentioned in the article. Go check it out, and the source code is available just in case you think something fishy is going on.
The second page I'd like to point you to is here. It's a 'Lad Vampire' antispam page that also targets spamvertised websites, but in a different way. The page links to individual images on the sites and constantly reloads them without caching, thereby burning up the spammers' bandwidth and driving them out of business (or at least costing them some money and forcing them to sell their children on the black market). Be forewarned that the page has no help, no documentation, and *only* works in IE, so don't yell at me about that. The source code is available for that as well, so here's hoping someone can make it more usable in Moz, Opera, ThunderFireBunnyChicken, or whatever browser is your fave.

Crush those sites? A sound idea. Start here. It's a Spam Vampire site set up by one of the more vicious anti-spammers I've ever seen in action. Non-caching, image-reaping, website-burning, bandwith-sucking action, all with a scorecard and a throttle. Now if we can just get this modded up so that a few thousand people are all playing at the same time...