[Spambayes] RoboVisitor

[Katz, Amir]

I applaud the idea, but I see two problems with it:
1. The activity of the robo-visitor will possibly return a precious piece of
information to the spammer - there is a real person behind the e-mail
address (or at least, there is a mail client that reads those e-mails). So
this e-mail address will now be resold to more spammers.
2. The spammers may develop their own counter-robot that detects the pattern
of the robo-visitor and retaliates by sending even more spam to the e-mail
address, trying to DDoS the mailbox.

IMO, the spam battle must take place at the ISP level and not originate from
the end-user's mail client.

Amir 

-----Original Message-----
From: Dean Lamper [mailto:lampy at email.si] 
Sent: Sunday, December 05, 2004 17:55
To: spambayes at python.org
Subject: [Spambayes] RoboVisitor

Hi all,

I am sure you all heard about recent Lycos initiative to fight spammers by  
kind of DDoS act. Not supprising spammers faught back at them redirecting 
their traffic Lycos way.

As Lycos was a central point of this enadavour it was easy to bring it down.

It was also a potential risk because it was them who decided who to target
at 
first place.

I have rather similar idea and I am sure I'm not the only one nor the first.


Spam exists because it is profitable. It will continue to exists as long it
is 
going to be profitable. All legislation of this worlk wont change that. See 
drugs. 

Spam filters are great relief from spam but they are actually help spammers.

They increase their profits by filtering out not-profitable traffic. Spam 
filters are mostly used by advanced users who generaly wont fall for cheap 
viagras, online casinos, p*** enlargment pill etc. Novice users are more 
prone to buy into such things and they rarely use spam filters. So by 
filtering spam mail the investment/return ratio for spammers is being 
increased. 

What needs to be done is make their bussines nonprofitable and they will
cease 
to spam. This is very easy to do, just extend spam filter with an optional 
'RoboVisitor', an addon that will visit all links contained in a recognized 
spam email a few times. It should be as unobtrusive to user as it can be.

This way costs for sending mail will come back to spammers in their
bandwidth 
bills. They will have to pay for *a lot more non-profitable* bandwidth as 
they used to.

Best regards,

Dean Lamper
Slovenia
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