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Spamholes Fighting Spammers

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the simple-and-clever dept.

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.""

4 of 396 comments (clear)

  1. I bet... by hookedup · · Score: 0, Redundant


    They (spammers) just start putting one of their own emails on their list. Once they finish their spam sending fest, they check their inbox, if they see nothing, then do it again on another relay.

    PLEASE DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU ARE A SPAMMER :)

  2. RTFA by Sanity · · Score: -1, Redundant
    They will just relay a message through each open relay they find to an account they can check, to see if the message went through.
    This won't work, the first few emails will be relayed.
  3. Re:How can this work? It can't, sorry. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Redundant

    The spammer will simply send every Nth spam to himself, and move on when there's no through connection.

    (Actually, the spammer's spam program will do this.)

    Meanwhile our good Samaritan with the spamhole will get his IP blacklisted at least, and his service revoked at best, since he had to let through N-1 spams to prime the trap.

    And all the while the smarter spammers will use all those nice non-open-relays that they can treat as open with drive-by spamming, thanks to unprotected wireless connections on home broadband. And also attacking his list of spamholes for exactly N-1 spams each from the new client he has become by using that wireless connection.

    AC post to avoid zealots DDOSing my servers, sorry.

  4. Re:How can this work? by KDan · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Most spammers use automated tools to fire off a huge amount of messages. They wouldn't likely bother with sending a message to themselves.

    Actually I would think any half-arsed spam tool will periodically send messages to itself to check that the relay is still working... So this spamhole idea, while neat, won't work with any but the most basic of spammers.

    Daniel

    --
    Carpe Diem