I’m really, truly fed up with spam. Every day when the spam
arrives and Norton Security moves it into the Norton Anti-spam
folder of my Outlook email client, I wonder how anyone can be so
incredibly stupid as to waste their time sending me such garbage.
Let’s face it; I never read it. I never buy anything from
unsolicited sources or do anything as a result of spam. I detest
it! And God knows I don’t need viagra, however many times it’s
offered.
What fool would send anyone a message about a mortgage
application approval when he has owned his house for years?
What fool would write offering me a peep at her new porn site?
I’m not interested in porn … I prefer the real thing. Offer me
something tangible and I may get excited.
I guess you probably feel the same.
Unfortunately, the plague of spam isn’t going to fade away any
time soon, although authorities (at least in Australia) have
started taking legal action and imposing hefty penalties for
spamming. Hallelujah!
As a last resort, I decided to make my own small contribution to
reducing the spam plague. If each of us does something, the
cumulative effect will be damaging to the spammers. Here’s what
I did. I’ve collected thousands of email addresses that arrived
in spam messages and ended up in my blacklist. I decided I’d
give those people using automatic harvesting software an
opportunity to suck up all those addresses and reuse them.
I’ve dedicated quite a few pages on my site that have nothing
but the email addresses from the blacklist. That is, the
addresses of the spammers, most of which are false and don’t
lead to anyone … at least not to anyone who can read
(otherwise I’d include an obscene message).
When the spam harvesting software goes through my site, it won’t
find a single working email address in my site proper, but it
will stumble on a goldmine of addresses and load them into it’s
database. It will be stuffed full of email addresses, none of
which work. The spammers will pay to send them out and they’ll
bounce somewhere, hopefully right back to them.
Imagine what would happen if we all did that? There would be so
many dud addresses floating around that harvesting would be a
waste of time. the spammers would all go away and do something
legitimate … perhaps.
You and I would get some relief from these annoying intruders in
our email inboxes.
If you are in a position to load your site with a few thousand
dud email addresses, why not give it a go and Stuff the Spammers?
First released May 2005. Copyright Robin Henry 2005