Some time back I thought the best solution would be to form a co-op. Members of the co-op would run some sort of program to detect spammers, and then join together in a DOS attack on the spammer's MTA. Detection should be pretty easy, I'd think, with minimal false positives.
When I thought of that, it wasn't illegal. It is now, so I've dropped thinking about it, but it would have reduced the spam. Of course, the collateral damage (to clueless users whose machines had been 0wn3d, as a minimum) would have been pretty high, and I'm not sure they would have been able to figure out why their systems broke down. Probably would have required a pretty big education program, as it were, to get people to either (1) stop using the primary virus propagator of the universe (I am, of course, referring to a certain operating system); (2) get off the internet; or, (3) keep their virus scanners up to date. Assuming, of course, that most spam comes from 0wn3d machines. Not sure that's a valid assumption.
I've tried running that thing that keeps spammers busy trying to deliver the email (tarpit? I cannot remember - the idea is you keep telling unknown MTAs 'hold on a moment' for a while - say an hour or more, thus keeping their delivery rate low. I should mention that at home I run my own MTA, so it was an option for me. Anybody using their ISP's MTA (or gmail, or...) cannot do this). The problem is that you need a LOT of people running that for it to do much good in spam reduction overall, and I don't' know if it reduced mine (but it was satisfying to look at the headers and see that couple of hour delay).
I finally gave up and just kept changing my email address (and I also used the spam detector in my email program).
Rusty
> -----Original Message-----
> On 11/09/2012 05:54 AM, Michael Havens wrote:
> > could someone send me a virus that I could 'share' with all the
> > thieves that try to scam me?
> > :-)~MIKE~(-:
>
> Not a prudent approach. What goes around comes around.
>
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