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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.""
This is not a bad idea though it could be abused. However what the author doesn't seem to realise that open relays may only account for 25% of spam. The rest comes via open proxys which mask the connection and mean that the mail server is receiving an SMTP session from a valid IP address. It might help a bit but at the end of the day the only good solution to fix spammers is hit them where it hurts in the pockets.
Of course that is easier said than done
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Just watch the RBL's and ISP's shut down your IP block for having an open relay...
How are they supposed to know the difference between a spamhole and a real open relay?
"Kinky sex involves the use of duck feathers. Perverted sex involves the whole duck." - Lewis Grizzard
i think it will not work for two reasons:
a) as mentioned before, it is easy to probe the hole to make sure it really works.
b) i seriuosly doubt that the security team of any university and / or company would enable such a hole because then they might get blacklisted and no more email for them...
I can see this being a great "live" email harvesting tool for some spammers. Setup a spamhole and just sit back and collect the addresses that other spammers try to send to. A good majority of the addresses will be good and you don't even have to waste time harvesting. This could be a windfall for technically savvy spammers with a little time to waste. Good God. Here we go again...
Anthony Papillion
Advanced Data Concepts, Inc.
"Quality Custom Software and IT Services"
Stopping spam is never the point of any prudent anti-spam action. Instead, anti-spam actions work by reducing the value of spam to spammers. This can be done by reducing click-through, reducing traffic and filtering that traffic which is out there. Always, spam will get through. The only way to combat spam is to reduce the profit margin and increase the time expense so much that it is worthless, and simply bad business to spam.
#define DRM chmod 000
This is a total Arms Race.
The initial test email would highlight the spammers test email address. All email to this address would then be allowed through the spamhole, giving the impression to the spammer that everything is hunky dory.
However, the spammer may use multiple test addresses, and the spamhole would not then be aware of these.
Therefore the spamhole could check for any addresses that were used frequently/periodically, and mark these as test addresses.
But the spammer could use a more complex set of test addresses.
The spamhole could use a combination of Bayesian filtering with Hidden Markov Models to renumerate potential test addresses with exponentially decreasing returns, such that the k-tuple value Z1 was never equal or above the Nth degree of reductionist SPAM (SPre). This would thus allow network strategist to implement a theory-based approach to network spam usage, thus continuing ad-infintum the ARMS RACE.
The result of this is that both spammers and anti-spammers remain in bussiness, spending exponentially increasing efforts attempting to thwart the efforts of the oposition.
Definition of a game: "A constructed conflict with quantifiable outcomes"
Ever get the feeling that the anti-spammers enjoy this whole malarky just as much as the spammers?
Maybe the answer to spam is this:
STOP wasting money and resources on using incresingly sophisticated anti-spam techniques. Re-direct this money into basic education for users, including short courses on:
1. How to identify a spam (People are proven to be far better at pattern recognition than Bayesian models).
2. How not to click on a spam.
3. How to delete a spam.
If AOL, MSN, and all other involved parties put a concerted effort towards this, then spam would soon get diminishing returns, and hence become increasingly unprofitable.
How about redirecting money into the hiring of Hit Men to get at the root of the problem? After two or three spam queens get knocked off, I think it may dawn upon the rest that spamming isn't such a good idea anymore...
Your brain is not a computer.