[ale] OT: the Penny Black anti-spam proposal

[jknapka at kneuro.net (Joe Knapka)]

"Greg" <runman at speedfactory.net> writes:

> Since many spammers just use others pc's I don't think the $/emails would
> work.

Agreed. I don't really see how the described proposal is any better
than a simple policy on the server end: don't accept more than N
messages per minute from any particular client (where a message is
defined as one email to one receiver - a single message with 1000 To:
lines would count as 1000 messages). And the "Penny Black" proposal
would be much, much harder to implement.

> Since many spammers are overseas I am not sure about the burning at the
> stake - however that would be a good job for the usually useless UN to do.
> I am for that.
> 
> Reverse email verification could be worked around if you use an account you
> set up on a hacked machine or are overseas.
> 
> What's needed is a massive campaign on the part of users to run up the
> spammers machines cpu to the point where it blows up.  Then it would be easy
> for sys admins to find out if their system is being used for spam.

This idea is similar to Paul Graham's "Filters That Fight Back"
proposal <http://www.paulgraham.com/ffb.html>. I had what I
thought was a better idea (<http://kneuro.net/programming/index.php?file=spam.html_content>), but Mr. Graham says that it's not as easy
as it looks, due to URL mangling done by many spammers.

> I dunno - I think the burning at the stake method is the best so far.

Sounds delightful!

Cheers,

-- Joe Knapka

-- 
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