begin quoting m ike as of Wed, May 18, 2005 at 07:59:24PM -0700: [attribution lost] > > Depends on how often people change their email address, or how > > often you need to add/remove people from your list. A lot of > > people have a pretty static set of friends and relatives that > > they can communicate via other means. It's the geeks who end > > up having relationships with people they never meet... > > > as a scientist, emails from strangers are important to me.
So a whitelist solution is bad. And hundreds of fake emails that someone may associate with you is bad, too. > > A few "don't send email to this address I mean it" can be caught by > > the harvesters without (hopefully) confusing grandma or a long-lost > > friend. > > I cannot tell if you are arguing that it is impossible to pollute a > spammer's address book by any significant factor. That may > be the case. But it would turn the tables, with spammers forever > trying to clean up their address lists. Gabe gave a great response. But I'll answer anyway... Why would spammers try to clean up their address lists? Sending email to a bogus address doesn't cost 'em anything. Since a vast majority of 'em are forgers, bounces don't affect 'em either. > > I can flood your system with spam to thousands of emails to fake email > > addresses in the hopes of hitting your real email address... if I use > > a zombie net, I can cripple your machine (or mail server) without > > really trying. In fact, the more fake addresses you have, the harder > > your machine would be hit. > > > in the end, how would the spammer benefit from this? Well, a 0.01% response rate is a success. If you're not a potential customer, and you deploy hundreds of bogus email addresses that result in your machine being crippled, it's no skin off the spammer's nose, and as an anti-spammer, it's basically a bonus. > > Got an estimate as to how big that is, and how long it would take to > > do the matching? > > I think it is very very feasible to match M = 500 emails per day against > N * M * D, where N is the number of fictitious addresses one owns, > and D is depth, in days, of the cache. Times U, for users. So a successful medium ISP with, oh, 1000 users gets to archive 100 * 500 * 30 * 1000 = 1500000000 messages. Let's say each message is 1k each. Then we're dealing with 1,500,000,000 kilobytes, or 1,464,843 megabytes, or 1,430 gigabytes, which is roughly a terabyte. [snip] > > I don't recall if RBLs expire IPs after a period of time (compromised > > As you've probably gather, I'm not to hip on these things. But I thought > that anything in an email could be spoofed. That is, what prevents a > spammer from making it look like the spam came from my IP, which is > valid, of course :) :) with the result that my IP gets added to the RBL. More likely that you're running a zombie box and that gets added to an RBL. But that's okay, that's what the RBL is *for*. > > "There ought to be just one" is generally a sign that someone is trying > > to exercise control -- and rarely is that exercised in your favor. > > Then you must love the de-centralized aspect of the tactic that i > proposed? To implement it requires one person, the user. It runs > locally. Though i guess the code would be somewhat centralized. It's fatal flaw is that it doesn't actually deter spammers. -Stewart "Although honeypot accounts are appealing." Stremler
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