Eliza for Spam

Saint Aardvark the Carpeted writes "Check this out for sheer genius...This guy has posted to Perl Monks a script that uses the Perl Eliza module to respond to spam. Check it and contribute your suggestions for improved vocabulary." The downside of course is that spammers never set their reply correctly (which I think is forgery, and should be treated as such) so this is probably more academic then useful, but its definitely funny.

Comments

Interesting conversation

[Arjuna Theban]

Cats: Eliza. All your base are belong to us.
Eliza: Does using that kind of language make you feel better ?

---

Why do you want to Make Money Fast?

[Apuleius]

'nuff said.

Eliza for tech support

[FozzTexx]

At a company I worked at a few years ago, there was one particular customer who liked to bug tech support just to have someone to talk to. He'd ask the most inane questions, then when he got the answer, he'd generally say "Why would I want to do that?" in reference to what he was asking us how to do in the first place!

It got old and so we set up a psuedo tech support person and had that person handle all his tech support. We would send his email through Eliza (the one in emacs) and then take Eliza's responses and send it back to him. This seemed to keep him satisfied, and kept our tech support from getting aggravated by him.

SirCam and Eliza

[UnclePaeng]

SirCam: Hi! How are you? Eliza: Why are you interested in whether or not I am ? SirCam: I send you this file in order to have your advice. Eliza: You're not really talking about me, are you? SirCam: See you later. Thanks Eliza: Oh... later. Thanks?

Cost them $ with your mouse - it's easy:

[jcapell]

Click here, go down the list and open each link in a new window (rightclick, openinnewwindow then tally up the $ damage yourself.

Hit 'em where it hurtz -

Chat bot in Action. :)

[BrookHarty]

Had to try it out. Heres the results from a typical spam...

[headers snipped]
Subject: Re: .BIZ .INFO Domains activation dates

Thank you for your mail! I am new to here, and
+do not have good english -- forgive :)>Dear Domain Registrant,

Hi, how are you?

>The dateline for .BIZ domains has been announced - Sept 17, 2001 is
>the last date for early-birds to pre-register their .BIZ domains.
>For .INFO domains, Sept 12, 2001 is scheduled to be the start-up date,
>where all pre-registrations made earlier will be processed.

What answer would please you most?

>We are now accepting pre-registrations for the new top level domains with
>extensions .BIZ, .INFO, .PRO, and .NAME. It is expected that over 3 million
>of
>these new domain names will be registered in the first few minutes when
>registration opens later this year. This will be the largest virtual real
>estate land grab in the history of the Internet.

I've told you before, I don't care about names -- please c

>According to the ZDNet July 2nd news article, industry experts have
>"estimated that 15 million dot-biz names will be registered by 2005".

I'm not sure I understand you fully.

>If you are looking for a great name like Cars.biz or Stocks.info, be
>prepared to face some stiff competition unless you pre-register early.
>http://www.NewExtensionsNow.com has built the premier pre-registration
>engine
>that can help you to secure the domain you want. Over 500,000 names have
>already been queued into our list and good names are going fast. If your
>domain name is important to you, do not wait until the last minute. Go to
>http://www.NewExtensionsNow.com to pre-register now.

I am not interested in names.

>If you have received this mailing in error, or do not wish
>to receive any further mailings from us, simply click here:

I would like to visit your site, but my mouse is broken

>http://www.newextensionsnow.com/cgi-bin/remove. cgi ?email=[snip]

That is interesting. Please continue.

Sounds like a bad idea

[Skuto]

Hmm, isn't replying to spam bad because it will
mark your address as 'in use' with spammers?

This looks like a fun thingy, but I wouldn't
use it to acutally reply to spammers for sure...

--
GCP

Re:Fill out forms

[Pedrito]

This guy has a lot of interesting ideas. I would think it would be fairly simple to write a program that did the following things:

1: If a SPAM message contains a form, you forward it to the program (which would create a local SMTP server to receive messages only from you). It would fill the form with random data, but somewhat intelligently, by parsing the HTML and figuring out what is valid for the form.

2: If a SPAM message goes to a web site with a form, go to that form in your browser. Run the anti-spam program and click a button to auto-fill the form. You could configure it to fill out the form multiple times, in the background, without user intervention.

3: If the SPAM message contains a link to geocities, or other free web hosting services, forward the e-mail to your anti-spam program's local SMTP server. It will grab the link and then forward the e-mail, header, and link to the appropriate abuse@ address.

There are probably other things like this that could be done. If someone wrote this program, I'd use it religiously, and I'd imagine a lot of other people would too. If it was easy enough to use and as unobtrusive as possible, people would be using it like crazy. The spammers would get wiped out.

Believe me, if I had the spare time, I'd start writing this program today.

Forgery?

[Kasreyn]

(which I think is forgery, and should be treated as such)

Strange. When slashdotters insert "NOSPAM" in their email addresses, making them incorrect and misleading, it's fine. And when the government proposes systems to track everyone online, the /. crowd erupts in a furor of activity, denouncing it as tyrannical. Yet, when spammers spoof their email addresses to avoid backlash of outraged netters too dumb to view the real headers and do a whois, (ab)using the very same online anonymity, it's suddenly "forgery".

Pfft, yeah, whatever. Let's start making some sense now Rob, hmmm?

-Kasreyn

@blibs.com

[slashkitty]

Haha. Well, I have been using a bunch of robot responders for email. You can reach alice@blibs.com, eliza@blibs.com and even mrt@blibs.com .. Alice and Mr. T will remember stuff about you and you can almost carry on a conversation with them. have fun.

response

[fender0011]

And how does it make you feel that eliza responds to spam?

cool :)

[XRayX]

Oh cool. Maybe Eliza can answer the tons of Linux Questions my LUG E-Mail List delivers to me daily:
Question: "Hey Eliza! I have aproblem with Samba 2.0.2"
Eliza: "Tell me about your problem!"
Question: "The Win 9x clients can't get acces to my Samba File-Server."
Eliza: "That's a pitty. Your Win 9x clients can't get acces to your Samba File-Server..."
...
X

Faked FROM fields.

[bluephone]

I agree it's nasty, but hardly forgery. It's no more forgery than writing "Dr. Nikolai Pantsanundies, 6th planet of the Gastric System, 7th Dimention" in the return address portion of an envelope. What we NEED instead of more stupid laws (we have enough idiotic ideas about computer "crime" in law enforcement already, Taco) is legal recourse for the recipient. I say, if we can track down who sent it, we should have a legal right to send them a bill, and sue if it's not paid. I mean a law that explicitly states this, not just a sig tagline like some guys have tried over the years.

Or, to speak their language:

[blang]

Thank you for your interesting product offer.

I would like to order one copy of your interesting home business opportunity package, 3 tubes of thigh cream, your revolutionary mass-mailing program, my preapproved credit card, and credit repair package. And if there are any left, given that the offer was a last chance offer, 4 of your revolutionary wireless web cameras.

Attached is my credit card information. Click to open. ccinfo.doc

Please don't use this

[13013dobbs]

This script is useless, unless you just want to harass some innocent third party. You will NOT be responding to the spammer. I know it is tempting to do, but your flames will not do any good. Why is that?

1. Spammers use invalid or non-working email addresses. While dealing with a spammer at my job (I work an abuse desk). The spammer told me that of a list of 200k email addresses 90% were bogus. Spammers don't put a working email in the 'From:' or 'Reply to:' fields because they would be flooded with bounces.
2. Spammers use random addresses in some innocent third parties domain. It is for the same reason as above. But this also helps to get past filters that try to determine if a domain is valid.
3. Spammers use the email address of someone who complained to them, or thier ISP. Spammers do this so the complainer gets to deal with the thousands of bounces, plus the flames, and now all the eliza replies.