[svlug] Re: a little tale . . . .

[Rick Moen]

[cc'ing SVLUG on an otherwise private follow-up to Solitaire MacIan:]

> So, as a spammer is So visible, it could therefore be possible to 
> note the spammer, welcome him with Wide open . .  back door . . . . 
> and as he goes gleefully hopping out the front door with his hose full 
> of spam, use that Being So Obvious to trace that hose back out the 
> back door, back to it's source, and  . . .  did I mention that Dis is 
> crawling with wizards?

Something almost as fun would be to make your MTA (SMTP server) dutifully
accept each and every spam, giving the customary "250 Accepted for delivery"
result message for each -- and silently send all of them to /dev/null.
I _like_ the idea:  Mislead the spammer into frantically pumping spam
at your server all day long, thinking he's found an awesomely efficient
relay, and tear it up invisibly upon arrival.

It's also possible to mess with a spammer's head, if you want to be
_really_ cruel.  (Of _course_, you do!)  The typical spam consists
of advertising for some alleged product of no interest to sane people:
The spammer plans to play percentages, hoping that 0.01% will respond
and the rest will be unable to get at him.

So, here's what you do:  Take the spammer's original ad text, and mess
with its content.  Make it look even crazier.  Make the product look
_really_ stupid, so that even the Darwin's Clients who might otherwise
buy into the scheme being peddled will laugh at it.  Not an obvious
parody, mind you, but rather something plausibly close but visibly
doctored to make the offer look unattractive.  

Now for the only difficult part:  Find a valid e-mail address for the
company that offers the product.  Someone in management would be 
perfect; maybe a marketroid.

OK, now for the clever part:  Send what _appears_ to be a mass-mailing,
with a Subject header _very_ similar or identical to the original,
addressed to the target executive, such that it appears to have a
huge BCC (blind CC) list of suppressed spam addressees.  (Note that
you do _not_ send out to 10,000 recipients; you just create the illusion
that you did.)

The person or company offering the "product" will typically go apeshit:
He'll imagine you sending out huge mass-mailings making his original
offer look really, really stupid and unattractive, and will envision
his target audience evaporating because of what you've done.

If you _want_ to see the messages of panic and indignation from these
SOBs, use a genuine sending address.  Otherwise, it's equally poetic
to use the same sort of forged header information that they themselves
employ.

Like it?

-- 
Cheers,               Everything is gone;
Rick Moen             Your life's work has been destroyed.
rick at hugin.imat.com   Squeeze trigger (yes/no)?
                       -- David Carlson (winner, haiku error message contest)

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