[spamcon-general] Anti-spam Attacks

[Itay Zandbank]

Hello there.     A few months ago I thought about a new approach to dealing with spam. The general idea is to bother the spammers back, either by simply crawling the website provided in the spam email, or filling various forms on the spam website in such a way it's going to take a human being a few seconds to realize it's a machine filling the form and not a real potential customer.     I was thinking of creating a generic and portable spam-back system that will do the form filling and crawling, and specific adapters to popular email clients that will add a "Spam back" button to the email program, and hopefully allow a user to designate an entire folder as "Spam back targets", and have the system attack all messages recognized as spam by a spam-filter.     Given a large enough user base, with each computer crawling a spam website each time a spam is received, and filling a form once, spamming is going to be a very costly process. Also, since there's no single point of attack, but rather a lot of computers, each one bothering you just a little bit, there's nobody to block, making it harder (although obviously not impossible) to protected yourself.     Since the whole point is a very large user base, I intend this to be free. And since I intend this to be free and naturally open-source, too. Being fond of Python, I think it will make a very good candidate for the major part. Plus, there's the Spam Bayes Outlook Add-in I can use for reference :-)     Today I started doing some research, and found out that at least two people thought of similar methods of retaliation. The first is David Black, as explained in this article by Sean Gallagher: http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,3959,920545,00.asp . The second is Paul Graham: http://www.paulgraham.com/ffb.html . This means someone else might already be working on that (all I could find was some Perl script that is obviously not going to do it - you need your own mail server for it to work).     Anybody knows of a similar project being developed?     Thanks,   Itay.