Slashdot Mirror
From Artist To Spam-Hunter
I am Kobayashi writes "Wired has a story about Andy Markley, a graphic artists, whose business domain name was spoofed by infamous spammer Eddy Marin and used to spam thousands of people. After the incident recurred at a new ISP, and at the risk of his business and sanity, Markley fought back. He tracked down Marin through several spoofed email addresses and several hi-jacked servers, and eventually was successful in getting Marin's current ISP to shut down his account. Too bad he was a graphic artist and not a professional bounty hunter...."
i expected a "and he torched the spammer's luxurious mansion in revenge" kind of ending... :(
3. Aggressive rejection of email via blocklisting causes some legitimate email to be rejected. However, that collateral damage is limited to spam-friendly parts of the Internet. The sender knows full well it was not read and can re-send the message via another channel if it is important. This knowledge also allows them to take action to correct blocking errors; and heightens awareness of who is not doing their part to fight spam.
Anyone who reads somethingawful.com knows that this isn't necessarily the nobrainer that you think it is. They had a particular problem where people would be able to sign up for their forum accounts, but they could not be mailed back with the activation because of the SPEWS blacklist determining that the part of the internet SomethingAwful belonged to was Spammerville, USA. This meant that 10-20% of the people who tried to get a forums account couldn't be mailed back, and SomethingAwful could even mail them back to explain why!
Here's a nice link for the angry rantings of Zack "GeistEditor" Parsons on the subject. Yes, we should fight spammers at every turn we get, but the "collatoral damage" means that some people can't even find out why they never get a reply from their girlfriend/grandparents/long lost friend.