TarProxy Creates Tar Pit... For Spammers

agravaine writes "I ran across TarProxy, which, IMHO, is one of the cleverest spammer-handling ideas I've seen yet. The gist: Early detection of incoming spam [using the statistical techniques pioneered on the client side] could be used to create an artificial scarcity of bandwidth experienced only by spammers." This project hasn't gone very far yet, but essentially is slows SMTP requests to suspected spammers. If this really works, and is installed on enough of the net, it could work. 144 spam so far today. Anything would be an improvement. CT Yup, it's a dupe. There wasn't anything better to post at 9am on a sunday, so you can just bitch about me instead ;)

Comments

Deja Vu

[BorgDrone]

Anyone else get a bit of a deja vu feeling reading this newspost ?

But he asked for it...

[Anonymous Coward]

From CmdrTaco's journal entry 2/18/03

Course in 2 full hours, not a single user emailed me. It's quite different then say, 3 years ago where every story I posted resulted in a few dozen emails in my box. I guess its a credit to the comment system that users have figured out that they can interact better online & with each other then by emailing me directly. But that said, we have a third of a million readers. Not one of them thought 'Hey, maybe I should tell Rob a dupe was posted'?

And then he goes on to say that subscribers should check for dupes, since they're paying customers and all.

Re:Spammers could put time limit on SMTP connectio

[Mike Schiraldi]

Additionally, almost all spam goes through an open relay -- the spammers almost never talk directly to the final mailserver. So TarProxy isn't hurting the spammers so much as the open relay sysadmins. The open relay sysadmins, seeing their mail servers slow down and run out of disk space, will either take the time to figure out what's going on (and hopefully solve the problem by securing their server), or do nothing and have their server hammered to the point where it can barely spam anymore.