Spam the Spammers

[Virago]

We're getting heaps at the moment trying to promote shares in various overseas companies. The bastards defeat every blocking mechanism I try.

It comes from a different address each time, so blocking the sender is a waste of time. The subject line is always random words, like "Carpet Facetious", or some such nonsense, so I can't block subject phrases. And the message text is sent as a picture, so I can't block words or phrases in the message body.

Aarrgghhhh!

[Biff]

Anyway, while I am attracted to the revenge factor of this product, how does it help resolve the issue of an Internet that's already groaning beneath a stratospheric welter of unwanted or unsolicited email?

Do you recall Lycos's screensaver, which was designed to spam spammers every time it was on? It didn't last long because too many people whined.

Well Lycos argued, and backed their argument up with some sort of evidence, that spamming spammers was proven to be effective, since most of them use third party hosts. So by spamming the spammer, the host is forced to stop/filter out all traffic to and from that site.

Allegebly.

[Hoon]

This would only work if the spam was coming from a legitimate source. 99% of spam emails ask you to visit a website, not reply to the email so the source/reply address is often fake/non-existant. If the mail address is valid then it probably belongs to some other poor sucker. The senders "reply to" address can be anything they want it to be so is not a reliable method of identifying the source.

The only way is to inspect the header information of the email (View/Options in Outlook2003". This will tell you where the email came from and the path it took however it only identifies the source by IP address. This may have been accurate at the time of deliver but spammers are likely to be using dynamic addressing so the IP probably belongs to some innocent now.

The tool itself sounds very effective but I would question its ability to correctly identify the source.

Can you post the original email and header information for our inspection?

[bert_is_evil]

We're getting heaps at the moment trying to promote shares in various overseas companies. The bastards defeat every blocking mechanism I try.

It comes from a different address each time, so blocking the sender is a waste of time. The subject line is always random words, like "Carpet Facetious", or some such nonsense, so I can't block subject phrases. And the message text is sent as a picture, so I can't block words or phrases in the message body.

Aarrgghhhh!

I'm getting the same stuff at my business address, funny thing is I work (indirectly) for Telescum - how much time do they spend promoting their xtra spam filters?....

[Sniper]

This would only work if the spam was coming from a legitimate source. snip The tool itself sounds very effective but I would question its ability to correctly identify the source.

Can you post the original email and header information for our inspection?

But the website itself contains links to an email address or form links that the tool searches out and exploits.

[SARGE]

i use Mailwasher.. was developed right here in NZ too... bounces the mail back to make it look like the addy does not exist...