[Spambayes] spampot and black holes

[Neale Pickett]

Tim Stone - Four Stones Expressions <tim at fourstonesExpressions.com> writes:

> I'm wondering if it might not be a reasonable idea to run some very easy to 
> find spampots, which (of course) don't actually relay the spam.  Might make 
> life sucky (at least temporarily) for some spammer somewhere...  We could even 
> make it so it's particularly slow in response time, so their spam activity 
> takes forever.  We could even return an smtp error response at random that 
> says something like "We're out here, and we will stop you."  <wink>

Well, spampot has been fun to run, but I can't say that it's really
catching a lot of spam.  I mean, it is getting a lot, but in droves of
like 20,000 copies of just one message.  Matt Sargeant's hunch appears
to have been correct so far.

Maybe if someone had the bandwidth to host one on a really fast link,
they'd get different results.  I don't know what these open-relay probes
are probing for, exactly.  They may do bandwidth testing and round-trip
time.

(Note that my spampot is currently off-line while I move to a new apt.)

Neale