Spam filters that fight back- a bad idea

There's an article on Wired.com discussing an idea for next generation spam filters that would fight back against spammers, by repeatedly visiting links advertised in spam mails to drain their resources and increase their bandwidth costs: http://wired.com/news/business/0,1367,61012,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2

My first reaction is- what are they thinking? If such an idea becomes reality, spam filters would instantly become the quickest way for any hacker to launch denial of service attack against any site they wish. Simply include the victim's URL in a spam, and send out to millions of people.

How some ideas are conceived I'll never understand.

Originally posted by WA
How some ideas are conceived I'll never understand.

idiots + technology = bad idea. if you want to see truly horrendous ideas, multiply the result by authority

Or when the programmer's boss's boss, who has no idea how the thing works, just decided it would be a good idea to add after some marketing idiot told him it....

The spammers are a evil bunch of people who will make money any way possible regardless of how rude or illegal their actions.

The spammers have been launching DOS attacks against anti-spam web sites and businesses owned by anti-spam crusaders so this is someone wondering how they could strike back against spammers in a way that would make sure the spammers efforts don't pay.

What I want to know is which bunch of idiots out there are buying from spammers. If the spammers never made a sale, they'd go away in a hurry.

You sure? Couldn't it possibly be that much of the mails are just sent by mischievous teenagers in a form of revolt against any authorities they see? I've gotten a fair number of spam that didn't have any links or other contact forms in them...

Oh, and why couldn't someone make a security enhancement to the mail system that made advertising opt-in?

The only opt-in system I'd trust would be one where my email address was kept by a honest third party where I could sign up for the kinds of advertisements I'd like to see and which would allow a cap on the maximum number they'd send in a week.

Still, I'd never use it though. When I want something I perform a search and hunt for what I want, it's the old "Don't call me, I'll call you." system.

I was thinking of such a system that all users are bound to their registred address, and a system where, if anyone sent unsolicited email, you'd be able to report them to some authority that had the power to do something.

Well, anyway, a system such as that would require all users to be registred in some way, anyway, and that's not exactly a thing I'd want.

Originally posted by Roy Sinclair


What I want to know is which bunch of idiots out there are buying from spammers. If the spammers never made a sale, they'd go away in a hurry.
Oh spam definitely converts into sales, and lots of it. There was an article somewhere profiling one spammer that sold those penile enlargement pills...he was a multi-millionaire. I think the reason spam is effective is that for every person that wises up and ignores spam, two new people that just recently got acquainted with the WWW will. Remember, the net is attracting new users every day, and these are the spammers' perfect audience.

Remember, the net is attracting new users every day, and these are the spammers' perfect audience.

That's why the ISPs ought to be working harder to educate their users, imagine how much better a new user's experience would be if they didn't get taken in by these thieves in the first place?

Of course it would also help if the ISPs didn't make it easy for the spammers to harvest lists of email addresses by visiting web pages which list users by their account name.