Slashdot Mirror
Spamholes Fighting Spammers
mike9010 writes "A person named I)ruid has come up with an ingenious way to combat those spammers. His program, spamhole, creates a false 'open relay' that the spammer thinks he/she can send messages through. The messages then get sent nowhere, and the spammer has no idea.
"spamhole is an open project. Hopefully, through user's and developer's contributions, we will amass a collection of spamhole implementations spanning all commonly used platforms, programming languages, etc. Ease of configuration and use are the primary objectives, for the easier to use by the non-techical layperson the implementations are, the more widely adopted and used spamhole will become.""
Stick it in your spamhole, pal!
Perfect...
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
+ Five minutes to implement.
+ It will fool spammers for five minutes.
+ Your ISP will disconnect you after five minutes.
Let's chalk this one up as yet another "nice try, shame about the lack of planning".
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Well, I'm told hitting them in the kneecaps can be quite effective too.
--
What short sigs we have -
One hundred and twenty chars!
Too short for haiku.
Kneecaps are to quick and not painful enough. You want something more drawn out. Prehaps electrodes attached to the testicals
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
That's not what a 'spamhole' is around *my* office. Pfft!
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Alternatively, you could hit their house. It really is amazing that a spammer would use their home address to register their spam business. In case you were wondering, the delivery joints in this area won't deliver stuff to this address anymore. Mr. Ralsky apparently didn't pay for *any* of the last 500 large with pineapple and andchovie pizzas that were ordered.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Protect yourself. Try and use proxies or a super good second browser with proxies that you never log into such as Opera (which makes it very easy to delete all private data). Thank you.
Or, you could just place a little less emphasis on what seems to be your lifelong goal of participating in Slashdot threads.
Oh, you mean like when they read about it on Slashdot?
Mencken had it right. So glad that's old news.
Spammers and virus writers together have already designed a distributed architecture in which they can send emails from hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of 'owned' personal computers.
I won't beleive it until I see the RFC.
I hear hitting them in the sack is even better.
Don't give out your real email address to the spammers. If you ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO use your email address for something, get an alternate email address, get the password you need or whatever, then switch to your main one or just don't switch at all. Multiple email accounts = good. ^_^
It was on an ancient DGUX system and I was having a bear of a time upgrading sendmail. Management had no clue they were running an open relay. -- "Whats that?"
So I stopped outgoing mail every night at 8pm, cleaned out the queues in the morning and restarted outgoing mail.
I had to keep the legitimate stuff but that it was not a problem figuring out what was legit and what wasn't.
After a few months I was able to install Red Hat -- end of problem, at least for a while..
Talk about arms race.. Now spammers will maintain blacklists for spamholes!
Spam eats up bandwidth just being delivered, even if it gets filtered at the end anyway
Yeah, but just think of all the extra bandwidth we'll have once UCE, viruses and scammail are finally banished by the Spamish Inquisition (nobody expects the Spamish Inquisition)!
Your original proposal is dead on arrival. You're proposing a solution to spam that involves changing laws, changing SMTP, changing email clients and servers, rejecting email from clients/servers that don't conform to the new standard, putting email certificates in control of a few central servers, and of course, reliance on lawsuits for ultimately stopping spammers.
Congratulations. You have successfully hit almost every point on this list, which was written by someone who actually knows what they are talking about.