Taking down spammers' websites

While the first spam email was sent nearly 30 years ago, by most counts we're about eight years into the modern spam crisis. Despite numerous state and national laws, the onslaught of junk continues unabated.

With users being dissatisfied with most existing products to deal with the issue, maybe it's time to take another tact. Of course, most of these users haven't tried using SpamButcher to block junk messages.

Money is the motivation behind spam. Maybe 85% of the time spam is trying to sell something directly, with most of the remaining messages being scams of sorts. More often than not, these products are sold via websites.

Anti-spam activist Garth Bruen runs a spam prevention effort that hunts down and decommissions websites run by spammers. The project collects spam email from users, and then processes it into a database of sites run by spammers. From the website content, it would appear they are focusing on "above board" methods such as contacting hosting providers or involving law enforcement. Other efforts by different organizations had engaged in more nefarious ways the disable spammer's sites in the past.

Bruen says that a relatively small number of people are behind the majority of the junk we get. He places the number of spam-gangs at around fifty. This brings up another possibility, if it were possible to get those handful of people behind bars, spam levels may radically drop.

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