Vernon Schryver <vjs(_at_)calcite(_dot_)rhyolite(_dot_)com> wrote:
Let's do some arithmetic. At $10/hour and 10 seconds per challenge
answered or account created, the cost would be about $0.03 address.
That sounds a little but not very high to send mail until the
challenge whitelist entry is deleted by the spam target. It sounds
low for a valid sender account that can be used for millions of
messages for days until the free provider notices enough bounces
or receives a complaint and terminates it.
Does anybody have any actual numbers on how good a return spammers get on
their spam, in terms of, say, cents per thousand spams? I suspect this
will be very hard to measure for spam that works indirectly (like
getting people to go to a URL that does not have an embedded tracking
number), and vastly different per category, but there may be SOME hard
data out there....
Free providers often impose delays of more than 10 seconds for
account creation.
Heck, that much delay can be imposed by normal data processing, web
congestion, etc....
That can be handled by giving your $10/hour
employees big monitors and have them run several windows
simultaneously to overlap with the delays.
I don't think it need even require large monitors and manual task
switching. It should be relatively simple (i.e., at most a month's
programming) to automate everything but the image interpretation. If it
presents a steady stream of images to a human, it could get the time
each down to maybe two or three seconds. Within a minute, I've thought
of a whole architecture for such a system, with modular screen parsing
for different providers, and configgable so you can keep up with changes
in their screens. Of course I'll leave it as an exercise for the
lurking spammers and spam-symps, but I can easily imagine someone
writing this sucker and selling it to spammers.
--
David J. Aronson, Unemployed Software Engineer in the Washington DC area
See http://destined.to/program/ for online resume and other information.
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