

Ask HN: Spam fighting with bogus lead gen nowdays? - sdrinf

Hey folks,<p>A couple of years ago, there was an innovative company, that basically took all these spam mails, and for every one of them sent to every recipient, it filled out their lead-gen forms with malicious (but still validating) data. To date, this is the state-of-the-art in fighting spam effectively (to my knowledge), since it impacts their revenue stream instead of an ever-escalating technological arms-race. Unfortunately, they went bust, when the black-hats started DDOSing them out. (My datasource at that time was, unfortunately, slashdot; please correct for any biases / false data).<p>Has there been any development on this front? Anyone tried replicating their model?<p>(I understand if it doesn't seems a lucrative idea to this bunch; I'm just saying, there are a couple of well defined sources in my spambox, I would be willing to part with good money to see them eliminated. )
======
thinkbohemian
I have a little website that i've been working on <http://www.whyspam.me> its
a more advanced form of mailinator. It gives you a disposable email that
forwards to your inbox. It's free, it never expires, so it is possible to
never ever give out your real email to another website again.

In addition we track the disposable emails that get deleted by users, and we
ask each user to generate a new email for every new website. That way we can
track the websites that spam.

Anytime the word "malicious" and fighting come up in the same sentence, i get
a little worried. Our goal is to give the user complete control over their
inbox, the problem with having a few gmail, hotmail, whatever accounts is that
if you sign up for a few semi-important things (like HN!!) if you delete the
email you delete your "forgot password" functionality. Also if you give your
web address to someone and they choose to sell it, you have no way of tracking
it, or stopping the additional spam sources. I'm trying to fix that with my
service.

While it might not be for everyone, its extremely useful to me...so i'll keep
improving it and making it a service I want to use. These spammers essentially
make money off of your data (email), so why don't we put some data back in
your hands, like a listing of the source of spam!

Let me know if you have any comments about the site, its a fully functional
beta...but not quite ready for a "Ask HN: Review my site". I'm also open to
new anti-spam technologies techniques or methods (preferably non-malicious),
so feel free to leave a reply.

------
j_lagof
I really think email spam is a problem already solved (at least for most end
users). I use gmail, yahoo and hotmail (for different accounts) and I rarely
get any spam.

Now, I know the anti-spam tools are working very hard to stay updated, but
using the spammers tactic is too much. Why change if the current
research/defense tools are working?

------
niyazpk
When you start playing on the same standards, what is the difference between
you and them?

~~~
tdoggette
That's nonsense. Spam deliberately attempts to defraud (at worst) and
irritates (at best) millions of people. Fighting back is attempting to prevent
this, by wasting the time of people that spam. That's the difference, and the
two acts aren't ethically similar.

