Anti-Spam Vigilantes - Part 2

Not long ago, the internet portal company Lycos launched a screen saver designed to make repeated requests of Spammer's web servers. They claimed that the program was intended to slow the servers and create additional bandwidths costs as opposed to crashing them.

Shortly after, the lawyers at Lycos apparently returned from their 4 martini lunches and killed the project before they got sued.

Now a company in California called Blue Security has a similar plan. Users can install its "Blue Frog" software and it will bombard spam related sites with thousands of "unsubscribe" requests.

The spam senders' sites will be identified using "honey pots" - or lists of fake generated email addresses scattered throughout the web. Logically, no one should send email to these addresses. When someone does, it's probably the result of "robot" finding the address and adding it to the spammers lists of victims.

Honey pots are frequently used by spam email blocker software developers to automatically compile large databases of email known to be spam.

There are some intricacies to their grand plan involving opt-out lists and such. It mainly sounds like legal trickery in an effort to prevent themselves from getting sued.

Skunk cabbage by any other name would still stink. This particular variety is known as a denial-of-service attack. Even if you're not completely shutting down the spammer's servers, you're still denying the owners the benefits of having them at full performance.

Of course, I don't really have any sympathy for the spammers. I do, on occasion have some respect for the rule of law. Legally, this would seem to be analogous to any other hacking attempt. It could also be argued that it constitutes theft of service.

I'm not entirely sure what the long-term answer to spam is. Efforts like these are however likely to turn the internet into even more of a battlefield than it already is.

The most productive way to combat spam on a personal level is by utilizing a high performance spam control software like SpamButcher. A free trial download is available from this website.

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