Re: cocoa-dev digest, Vol 2 #3018 - 18 msgs
Re: cocoa-dev digest, Vol 2 #3018 - 18 msgs
- Subject: Re: cocoa-dev digest, Vol 2 #3018 - 18 msgs
- From: "Alastair J.Houghton" <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2003 14:20:54 +0100
On Wednesday, October 15, 2003, at 03:07 am, Richard wrote:
So my posed solution is to fight back.
Imagine what would happen if every single
person responded to a spam email by downloading
the web site. I would expect the spammers web site would become
unusable. Then imagine everyone downloading the
same web site every 60 seconds.
So here is the idea. DontGetMadGetEvenWare.
A piece of software that runs in the background
and scans your email
spam box, extracts the URL of their web page
and then builds a list of URLs. It then
periodically downloads the web page
for each URL.
No doubt there will be some objections.
A lot of objections. Spammers' websites are often hosted by legitimate
companies, many of whom don't even know that their domains are being
used for spam. Moreover, *other people* share the same servers to run
perfectly legitimate businesses, totally unrelated to spam. By doing
this, you would be damaging *their* business.
Basically, you won't harm the spammer (well, not significantly) by
doing this, but you may harm a lot of other people. Indeed, it is even
possible that the spammer will get paid by advertisers for the large
number of hits on their site; they might actually be *happy* that
you've done this. Plus you'll almost certainly end-up confirming the
existence of your e-mail address this way.
PLEASE *don't* try to write software in this category
("DontGetMadGetEvenWare" or whatever you wish to call it) without a
more complete understanding of the Internet as a whole. Other people
have tried similar things before (e-mail auto-responders, for example),
and they just cause problems for ISPs and other people who just want to
use the Internet. (In the specific case of auto-responders, they have
an annoying tendency to cause mail loops and other such problems.)
If you *really* want to stop spam, then lobby your MP, MEP, congressman
or whatever you have in whichever country you're in. They can
introduce legislation that can curb spam by allowing them to arrest
and/or fine spammers.
Kind regards,
Alastair.
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