Prosecuting A Spam Artist

ronmon writes: "DSLReports has discovered evidence of a creative Spammer / Data Miner who has managed to glean email addresses from their member's information pages. Apparently someone has gotten around to writing a script that decodes obfuscated addresses like imasobATspam_centralDOTcom, which was only a matter of time. Server logs show well over half a million requests from several IPs in a specific block and they have been advised that they are in a good postion to prosecute. They're asking for legal help, so any of you good hearted lawyers out there looking to boost your karma, here's your chance :)"

Comments

A suggested solution

[Second_Derivative]

I'm of the opinion that there's only really one proper way to do this: an image generator. The site should keep a database of emails, together with a random ID. Then, whenever an email needs to be displayed on a page, you insert an image tag that looks like, say /> or whatever. This script looks up the email address in its database, then draws it. It then applies some noise and distorts it so that the email is more or less readable, but you'll have a hell of a job trying to automatically read these emails. Dunno, anyone think this will work?

Re:You know, I don't think spam is all bad.

[BobMarley]

I've resisted the urge to follow the link in a spam if the link looks like it might be interesting.

The definition of "spam", at least in my book, is "Unsolicited Commercial Email".. for the most part, anyway. There's non-commercial spam too. The whole concept being that it's UNSOLICITED. I get tons of mailings (electronic and dead-tree versions) from organizations whose products I have purchased. I don't consider this spam, because by purchasing their product, I have elected to become part of their "previous customer" list. If I have a choice, however, I ALWAYS elect not to have my contact information sent to any outside parties, and I won't knowingly do business with any organizations who do this without my knowledge.

cheers
BM

we should all fight spam

[4444444]

if everyone would do what ever they could to fight spam we could really make some progress against spammers
you could use spamcop.net or read some of these ideas