Why would you want to give feedback to the spammer?
Anyway, it seems to me that real spammers are getting more successful, not
less successful. They have won in court, and the radicals on spam-l have
given up on lawful methods.
And it also seems that real spammers have T3s, opt-in lists, working
opt-out addresses, and tend to be fairly responsible, so far as I can
tell. They are clearly not the ones sending out the garbage that is most
annoying---most of that isn't genuinely commercial, or even genuinely
fraudulent. (To commit fraud, you have to take money). For example, none
of the Nigerian scam mails that I've responded to try to get information
or money, nor responded at all, except for one person who said his address
was forged.
Indeed, the DMA (Direct Mail Association), a historical advocate of junk
mail, and also of spam, has taken the position, essentially, that legal
controls are necessary; Not on genuine spam, but on the abusers sending
garbage to annoy people. In other words, the radical antispammers.
--Dean
On Mon, 15 Sep 2003, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
On maandag, sep 15, 2003, at 03:50 Europe/Amsterdam, Dean Anderson
wrote:
I think that content analysis holds much promise. Only a few years
ago, we
thought that speaker-independent voice recognition was science fiction.
And in the '60s we thought we'd all be going to work in a rocket by now.
Throwing away spam after the fact has the problem that there is no
feedback to the spammer, so they happily continue to spam the same
email address. And because their spamming gets less successful, they're
forced to spam even more.
But I guess content filtering can be used to blacklist spammers by
their IP address in close to real time. That would be useful.