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If a spammer makes money on the 1 in 1000 (Not aware of actual figure) users who respond to spam, then by increasing the margin you lower their profit.
Artificially increasing the flow of spam, clouds their profit margin and in the end lowers the spammers profit. While also placing increased burden
on the systems spammers use to transmit spam, which may assist in these systems becomming unavailable to spammers.
I often create throw-away hotmail addresses during the course of my internet activities, and used to be annoyed by the pages of advertisers that hotmail wished me to sign up for. These days, I figure I may as well sign up for all of them since it's a throw-away account, and since i'm not paying for the bandwidth. I had wondered whether my signing up for spam, and not being a customer, had made spam a little more unattractive to the advertiser, even if only by a slight fraction.
On a wider scale, perhaps it would make a fraction more of a difference. A program which instead of harvesting e-mail addresses, harvests advertisers and signs up using dud addresses or better yet, addresses of which respond but do not buy.
Wpoison
http://www.monkeys.com/wpoison/
Wpoison generates random web pages with random bogus e-mail adresses. [Brummo, Oct 17 2004]
[link]
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I wouldn't want to encourage creating junk email addresses just for the purpose of signing them up to receive spam. It takes more work on your part than it creates work for the spammer. In addition, it costs the free email address provider money, so that practice could eventually lead to the demise of free email accounts. Yes I have a spam bait email, but I don't TRY to get spam, I just used that address when communicating with any business or web page I don't trust. |
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However I do like the idea of attempting to waste spammer's resources by responding, but never buying. Kind of the like the practice with postal junk mail of stuffing the "business reply envelopes" with trash and returning it, costing the advertiser additional money. |
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There are many variations of this idea out there, some of which are implemented. I do something like it on my own SMTP server -- when it detects likely spam being injected by a client, it deliberately slows down its responses, and some of its responses (messages sent back to the client) become very large. |
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On a very large scale, societies have been grappling with these problems in a variety of ways. Yours is somewhat akin to Christianity's general response to evil: instead of committing violence against evildoers, casting evildoers out of society, or simply ignoring them (which roughly correspond to Islamic, Jewish, and Buddhist approaches?), Christians are instructed to "turn the other cheek". |
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The result is that the evildoer spends more time and energy on that one "victim", who is counseled to not view himself as a victim (nor to allow himself to be compelled to amplify or redirect evil), time and energy that therefore cannot be spent going after someone else. |
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It's also how I dealt with Jehovah's Witnesses (or maybe Mormons, I forget) coming to my door many years ago. I invited them in, talked with them about the Bible for about 10 minutes, at which point they made a hasty exit and never returned to that address. When they showed up at my new address (in the same town) shortly after I moved here, they quickly determined I was the "same guy" and left immediately. I treated them decently and lovingly; they simply learned to not waste their time (and risk one of the two being "deconverted" ;-). |
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So it seems like a generally workable strategy in the case of spam. I'm not so sure about viruses; but, again, my SMTP server "tarpits" those as well, and I figure while the viruses are wasting time attacking my server, they're spreading more slowly than if my server just dropped connections from them immediately. |
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