Paul Graham: Filters that Fight Back

Mortimer.CA writes "Paul Graham is back with another article about combating spam. It's entitled Filters that Fight Back: 'One intriguing idea is to literally fight back: to make filters disable spammers' servers by automatically following all the links in each incoming email. We may be driven to this in order to achieve accurate filtering anyway. Why wait?' One danger is someone doing a DDoS by sending fake spam."

Comments

We're going mobile!

[Superfreaker]

/.ing moves from the web, right into your own mailbox! All the fun of crushing someone elses website without all of the work of clicking those tiresome links.

Note to self: Move web site off of modded GameBoy running apache.

Are you kidding??

[amjohns]

This is brilliant. It costs the spammers little bandwidth to send out SMTP messages. But if we start downloading their graphics-rich webpages, and reloading repeatedly, we'll drive their bandwidth through the roof.

The point is not the user's bandwidth, this is really a DDOS, but since the spammer's asked for it (literally, not just figuratively), it's OK.

I'm 1337

[MoeMoe]

One danger is someone doing a DDoS by sending fake spam

I'm sorry but spoof's dont usually work to well on me... I'm 2 1337 to be fooled.

Seriously though, if you just take a little more time to look into the header contents of that "penis enlargement" ad, you might find a pretty new IP addy to "play with" *cough* BO2K *cough* or atleast the real route that this spam took to get to you, just follow the yellow brick road back up to Mr. 12 extra inches and... well, you decide your own punishment for 'em ;)

Besides, it's not like you need that ad... do you?