[107971] in Cypherpunks
Re: Idea to eliminate most spam on mailing lists
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Rabid Wombat)
Sat Jan 30 14:02:22 1999
Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 13:39:37 -0500 (EST)
From: Rabid Wombat <wombat@mcfeely.bsfs.org>
To: Jay Holovacs <holovacs@idt.net>
cc: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.32.19990130112045.00707e64@pop3.idt.net>
Reply-To: Rabid Wombat <wombat@mcfeely.bsfs.org>
On Sat, 30 Jan 1999, Jay Holovacs wrote:
> At 05:11 AM 1/30/99 +0000, Michael Hohensee wrote:
> >
> >
> >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.
> >
> Probably not. Most spammers are not looking at individual mailings and
> certainly not checking to see if a particular spam made it through a
> particular listserver then rewriting it to do so. They are doing a shotgun
> approach.
>
If most mailing lists adopted this approach, the end result would be that
the spammers would start buying "passphrase enabled" spam kits from
enterprising authors.
When the gold rush is already on, you don't make money panning for gold.
You make money selling shovels to the other dumb bastards who are panning
for gold.
In the long run, we'd all be going through additional effort to use our
lists, simply to create a market for a new "spam kit" product.
