Ok - I had an idea about a perverse way of blocking spam, and wonder if anyone is interested. Basically, it relies on you having multiple e-mail addresses which are forewarded to the same account.
If you make sure that any spam mail list that happens to have your name on it has at least 2 or 3 of your other e-mail addresses, then you can filter out any messages that arrive, duplicated, to more than one of your addresses.
This means that you can deliberately try to get on as many junk mail lists as possible, as long as you make it on to the list several times. If it worked, it would mean that you could reply to junk mail to try and get yourself taken off a list, safe in the knowledge that, as long as your from: or reply-to: address was different from the address to which the original e-mail was sent, even if your name were appended to the list, you would receive no more junk mail. You could even reply with a message along the lines of "put me on your list, please, I love junk mail" in your replies. The harder the spammers try to collect your addresses, the more likely they will get filtered out.
Apart from the increase in net traffic, and the possibility that the spammers might cotton on to the fact and try to weed out duplicate addresses, or send non-identical spam to the addresses on the list, can anyone see any flaws in this.
Slashdot Mirror
This is company that can't distinguish between effected and affected when giving out important information...
Ok - I had an idea about a perverse way of blocking spam, and wonder if anyone is interested. Basically, it relies on you having multiple e-mail addresses which are forewarded to the same account.
If you make sure that any spam mail list that happens to have your name on it has at least 2 or 3 of your other e-mail addresses, then you can filter out any messages that arrive, duplicated, to more than one of your addresses.
This means that you can deliberately try to get on as many junk mail lists as possible, as long as you make it on to the list several times. If it worked, it would mean that you could reply to junk mail to try and get yourself taken off a list, safe in the knowledge that, as long as your from: or reply-to: address was different from the address to which the original e-mail was sent, even if your name were appended to the list, you would receive no more junk mail. You could even reply with a message along the lines of "put me on your list, please, I love junk mail" in your replies. The harder the spammers try to collect your addresses, the more likely they will get filtered out.
Apart from the increase in net traffic, and the possibility that the spammers might cotton on to the fact and try to weed out duplicate addresses, or send non-identical spam to the addresses on the list, can anyone see any flaws in this.
Of course, if it went wrong at some point ... :)
yan