Lycos Launches Spammer Slamming Screen Saver

I thought I'd heard every crazy effort to eliminate mail spam - but this one is entirely new - and may have at least some merit.

Lycos has created a spam fighting screen saver. The idea is that when end-users install the screen saver on their systems - it generates bogus traffic to websites known to advertise via spam. The servers are consequently slowed down, and their owners get stuck with the bill for the extra bandwidth used - driving down the profitability of spamming.

How much this will actually work is a good question - but it seems reasonable it could have some effect. If I was Lycos however, I'd be highly concerned about retaliatory attacks by hacking spammers. Spammers have a long track record of attacking spam busting organizations electronically.

Even worse - they might send in the lawyers.

One way or another - the screensaver won't do much to solve your own spam problem. For that, look into an email spam filter like SpamButcher. SpamButcher out performs other spam killers by using the latest fuzzy logic technology in its filters.

Resource: Lycos Launches Spammer Slamming Screen Saver