FFB: [was: terrible, nasty idea...]

[Andreas Pardeike]

I like the idea too but despite the problems listed below there is
another factor: some URLs are designed to give spammers feedback
about the quality of target emails. And you certainly don't want
to give them that feedback.

Andreas Pardeike

On 2004-08-25, at 21.55, David Relson wrote:

>> I like this idea a lot. The downside is that it uses the bandwidth of
>> the recipient (or his antispam agent). The upsides are numerous. I
>> doubt spammers pay for high-bandwidth server space, since their
>> margins are so tiny, and they aren't going to use it for SMTP since
>> they multiplex their mailings over a load of ISPs to keep themselves
>> from getting closed down. So you either effectively DoS their little
>> server, or you make them pay for exceeding the bandwidth quota of
>> their big, hosted server, which normally only gets about 5 or 10 hits
>> a day. And if you find one that does have a high bandwidth server
>> specifically for SMTP, then you hit the very bandwidth they ant to use
>> when you start chasing up the URLs.
>>
>> Nice.
>>
>> Lee
>
> Hi Lee,
>
> It's kind of a nice idea.  Checking the URL for content isn't overly
> hard, however you must first identify the URL.  That seems difficult to
> me as a message can have multiple URLs in it.  One needs to be human
> visible, but there can be multiple other invisible ones.  Determining
> the proper one may be difficult.  Simply using the first one, or the
> last one, etc, could (indeed) lead to a DoS of an innocent party.  Not
> good :-<