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Re: Re: Re: Re: Enough is Enough - Taking the fight back to the Internet scammers

by Roy Johnson (Monsignor)
on Oct 28, 2003 at 18:05 UTC ( [id://302741]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Re: Re: Re: Enough is Enough - Taking the fight back to the Internet scammers
in thread Enough is Enough - Taking the fight back to the Internet scammers

Tachyon said:
As a result the challenge response/whitelist passthrough is probably the way it will end up in the medium term. Then of course the spammers will implement respond bots and the cycle will continue.

But the beauty of that is that they can no longer hide their mail address. It has to be valid. Then you can blacklist it. Setting up numerous real respondbots is much more onerous than just formulating fake return addresses.

The thing that gets me is: what are they thinking? If someone is trying to filter out their offers, how likely is it that that person will decide to become a customer when their efforts are thwarted?

Earthlink has a rather ingenious system: they set up some fake accounts expressly to attract spam. When those accounts receive it, they analyze it and filter it out of clients' mailboxes. It works very well. In addition to that, there is whitelisting.

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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Enough is Enough - Taking the fight back to the Internet scammers
by Anonymous Monk on Oct 31, 2003 at 01:26 UTC
    Roy asked: The thing that gets me is: what are they thinking? If someone is trying to filter out their offers, how likely is it that that person will decide to become a customer when their efforts are thwarted?
    1. Most of the filtering is done by clueful sysadmins, they want to get clueless users.
    2. Apparently the necessary success rate to keep genuine advertising spammers in business is just over one in a million.
    3. Most spam nowdays has nothing to do with advertising dubious products, even if it pretends to be. It is a big pyramid scheme where they sell each other lists of addresses (and hopefully the whole thing will implode real soon). In these emails, all they want is for the sucker to view it in an HTML-aware mail client, to pull in a web bug and confirm the address is live. It doesn't matter if it's immediately deleted. In fact I'm increasingly seeing ones where the "click here" links don't even resolve.

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