[107960] in Cypherpunks
Re: Idea to eliminate most spam on mailing lists
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael Hohensee)
Sat Jan 30 00:13:14 1999
Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 05:11:38 +0000
From: Michael Hohensee <mah248@is9.nyu.edu>
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Reply-To: Michael Hohensee <mah248@is9.nyu.edu>
"Stephen Gutknecht (vw)" wrote:
>
> Why don't we just require the list software to look for a specific string at
> the start of a message.
>
> For example, the phrase "crypto is good" must appear in one of the first
> three lines of a mail message.
>
> The phrase would be known by people... easy... but throw off any automated
> spam. Wouldn't this eliminate most of the spam to mailing lists?
It would, for about 15 seconds, when some enterprising spammer noticed
this and included it in his spam. Even if the passphrases were
different for each mailing list, it wouldn't take much to write a
program which monitors list traffic searching for such patterns, and
which incorporates said patterns into subsequent spam to that address.
The most you'd be doing is making the spammers burn a few more CPU
seconds, and it'd cost us more in bother and bandwidth than we'd
ultimately gain.
