ietf-asrg
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[Asrg] Time for the ISPs to fight back!

2003-03-05 12:55:42
I believe that it is not enough to just keep developing ever more complex 
methods of filtering out spam, the spammers will just continue to circumvent 
the filters. Witness the recent use of spacing between letters such as 
"L_O_OS_E W_E_I_G_H_T" in emails.

Instead I suggest that the detection software at ISPs should respond to the 
spam it detects. This wouldn't effect the few false positives that are found, 
in fact it would be a service as it would advise them to rephrase their subject 
line.

Spam works like all mass marketing by fooling a small percentage of those 
contacted into responding, if a high percentage responded then their system 
would collapse or at least become a lot more expensive to run. If the detection 
software used by ISPs harvested the unsubscribe email addresses or links from 
the spam and responded to them wit false emails then the computers of the 
spammer would be overwhelmed. AT the every least it would kill the unsubscribe 
link.

Pinging every spam link discovered would dramatically increase the bandwidth 
the spammer was using and therefore their costs. 

And low cost is what makes spam so attractive.

That's my contribution to the debate, I don't have the technical expertise to 
know how to do this but it seems relatively cheap and simple to implement to me.

Richard Warwick