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This was a common proposal to fight spam in the bad old days. Have clients autodownload the graphics, click on all the links, and reply. That would drive their
by fovc 10y ago
This was a common proposal to fight spam in the bad old days. Have clients autodownload the graphics, click on all the links, and reply. That would drive their hosting costs through the roof (100x more traffic) and shift the economics of spamming. It didn't work because doing that would confirm your email was real and would increase your spam in the short term. For scammers this might not be as big an issue
- 300bps 10y agoAnother flaw might be if I wanted to attack nonspamminghost.com I would just need to send out spam in their name with links to their site and let antispam measurements do my dirty work for me.
- vidarh 10y agoBack when I ran an e-mail provider, we had this kind of thing regularly. Worst one, though, was when some spammer faked spam in the name of a guy that had previously tried to track him down, with a message advertising child porn with the anti-spam activists name and address. The guy needed police protection and his mailbox overflowed with threats. It was a pretty stark reminder that you can rarely trust the source of an e-mail, and any counter-measure against suspected spammers needs to be weighed very carefully, because it will be used as a tool to attack adversaries. Including anyone the spammers perceive as trying to attack them.