Lycos Anti-Spam Screen Saver Canned

After just a few days online, Lycos has taken it's antispam email screen saver back down.

Lycos's unique spam removal effort was a direct assault on spammers - perhaps too much so for its own good. Most applications aimed at spam reduction are some type of anti-spam filters - at some point they analyze email messages and discard them if they look too "spammy."

Instead, with "Make Love Not Spam" users computers would send thousands of bogus requests to known spammers websites.

Lycos insisted that its efforts would never amount to a full denial of service attack against a spammer - it would just drain they're servers resources and run up their bandwidth bills. Still - this sounds an awful lot like theft of services (exactly what spammers do) - and possibly against the law (at least in some jurisdiction).

Lycos obviously upset a good number of spammers, and possibly their ISPs. It looks like they may of even had their site hacked at one point. One way or another - the projects been called to an end. An interesting idea, but apparently not a very good solution to spam. Users who need an effect spam eliminator should look into one of several pieces of software for blocking spam such as SpamButcher.

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