Re: [vps-mail] hurting spammers where it counts (was: Update)

[Scott Wiersdorf <scott@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Oct 08, 2003 at 09:47:58AM -0500, Rae French wrote:
> At 09:16 AM 10/8/2003, Scott wrote:
> >[I still think autosubmitting is wrong for reasons I've already posted]
> 
> Furthermore, many 
> webhosts, trying to keep their customers happy, are setting up automatic or 
> even one-click processing of spam for their customers.

I'm ok with one-click systems, since the message still has to be seen
by a human before it's submitted. That's all I care about, really. I
think one-clicks are good: anything to shorten the reporting loop (but
still requires a little human intervention) is fine by me.

> As we progress to 
> make things easier for our customers, we are creating a greater problem for 
> ourselves. IMO, we should be putting more effort into getting rid of 
> spammers than getting rid of spam.

That's a good assessment of the problem. Spammers need a financial
disincentive equal to or greater than their financial incentive to
spam. Money makes the spammer's world go round (how else could you
explain such an absence or ignorance of common sense and decorum?)

One interesting solution I read recently was to send a web robot to
crawl the entire site of received spams. Every spam (or nearly so) has
a URL somewhere in it that they want you to click. Imagine an
automated system that did just what they wanted: it clicked it and
followed every link of every page. Can you imagine the bandwidth costs
the spammer (or company that hired the spammer) would assume when
millions of users began hitting their site?

An erudite friend of mine at work noted that this has potential, but
it also opens up all kinds of opportunity for enormous abuse, as all
automated system do. All a spammer would have to do to disable such a
system is put an innocent site in the spam somewhere as well. Anyway,
I think the idea is correct: we've got to figure out a way to hit the
spammers (or companies who support spam) where it hurts.

Scott
-- 
Scott Wiersdorf
scott@xxxxxxxxxxxx
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