Steven's Profile

Member since March 23, 2005

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  1. Comment - IBM Fights Back Against Spammers

    (Mar 23, 2005 - 10:56 AM)

    Actually, it's not quite so stupid. Given the sheer volume of spam email that is sent from a particular location, getting all that e-mail BACK in a huge flood gives them a taste of their own medicine.

    What would be MORE effective though, than simply redirecting the spam back to the originator, is autoreplying with an "Error 500" (address dead) message to fool the originating server into believing the address doesn't exist. Apple Mail and KDE's mail client both have the ability to do this manually, but it's limited because it relies on the From or Reply-To addresses, which are almost always forged.

    My current solution is redirecting unsolicited commercial e-mail to the Federal Government's spam database (spam@uce.gov), letting them collect it for use in potential prosecution of spammers for violations of the CAN-SPAM act. If the reply address includes a major provider (i.e., Yahoo!, AOL, Hotmail), their antispam address also gets a copy.