Well during the last couple months I have seen a lot of the efforts about tackling genuine spam e-mail (not including malware) to be as palliative as possible. Basically, what we have been doing in the last years is just trying to conceive a way to discard what is just unsolicited commercial e-mail, not concentrating on the economics of the business.
I have been thinking lately abut it, and what makes spam so compelling is its cost (actually this is not a new idea). It basically means that you do spam because it is cheap, direct and people just try to get rid of it, nobody actually fight back.
When I mean fight back is to take down the spammer by any mean, from the plain and ethical legal process of cancelling the domain name to a raw, and mundane DDoS. If yo are faint of heart or you believe in ethics as the only way to solve the issue, I recommend you to stop reading.
OK, here comes my idea: Lets attack the spammer where it really hurts. Lets change a bit the economics of the matter. If spamming costs more, than maybe some people will not use it as a marketing tool. I mean specially those specialised companies on "direct internet marketing" will start to have bigger operational costs, making them less profitable and thus increasing the costs to the company hiring the marketing tool.
My idea can easily be implemented with today's available technology. I mean that, if we are able to build an e-mail client extension where the user can signal when something is or not actually a spam, we could basically set up some rule to poke the server where an embedded image (in the spam) is coming from, or even an URL present in the e-mail on a regular timely basis.
The interface should be easy to use, just asking how angry the person is that day with spam, and from that derive the counter-attack strategy (poking rates). After that, we can run in a mode where the user can say what is spam and what is not (safer mode) or even let any tool that detects spam heuristically do the job.
The idea behind this is that when a marketing company sends an e-mail, they take into account that no more than 10% will actually receive the e-mail(our strategy is discard), and from that less than 1% (from the total) will actually open it. With our extension, we will increase the spammer's server load poking him for everything that is "pokeable" in the message. We can do it repeatedly, lets say 10 times a minute. This means that his cost with bandwidth and servers will increase without increasing the actual return for the number of spams sent. So we are attacking the economics of the game.
Of course no idea is perfect, and I can see at least two initial drawbacks to the idea: First we as we know spammers will adapt putting less "pokeable" content in their messages. There will be no URLs, no images and no return e-mails. This means two things: or the spam will come with everything already embedded in it, thus costing more server time and bandwidth to send it, or it will less appalling to someone to buy anything, since they will loose a lot of the marketing power by not being able to use the above mentioned things.
The second drawback is a bit more (ethically) discussable. Imagine that someone just hires a "direct marketing" to take down some other's website. Well as we know this is a possibility, and will actually affect more the smaller players in the Internet game. But I think this is a worth causality to a greater good (like in any war), since that when the spammers hit someone and take them down or increase the cost of their business, for sure there will be legal cases against the spammers. If they hit some one bigger the bigger will be the case.
Even though ethically questionable, this idea, I think, is one way for an individual to fight back the spam industry. What we can do is unite power and spend some Kb of data each to increase the spammer costs, changing the dynamics of what is happening. Transferring the fight to another niche and making the whole business model less profitable is for sure much more efficient than most methods we have seen so far.
What do you think? leave comment in the blog.
