Tired of Spam? Calling to all GOOD coders!?

Question

I am a web designer/coder, installer of servers.
I have been recently approached to set-up a server capable of sending 1,000,000 emails per hour, 24/7...
Good money, but I refused.
I intend to design an OPEN SOURCE program to be installed on SERVERS (with server's owner's consent).
- On detection of a spam passing through (and with "manual" control), the messages would be discarded and NOT forwarded.
- The name of the originating server (IP address) would be put to a DB list of "unwanted submissions". Any further mail from these servers would be discarded.
- The names of spam servers would be stored in DB, and communicated to all other servers affiliated.
- If possible, some sort of "search and destroy" program would search on these servers the DB of addresses and destroy it.
So, if your are a white hacker or a very good programmer, I would like to hear from you. Email me!

John: Good advice: will follow through.
Colin: can´t discard by algorythm: need human touch.
Dave: like the hit-back idea!

Answer 1

I have an idea. How about adding a simple subroutine to all pages served that look up the IP address on the pages served on the IP Black Lists. If the IP is black listed, display a page that the IP address has been black listed and the page is not available to spammers.

This could be a simple front end to all webservers.

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I have written my own spam filter for myself and my company. It is not open source so the spammers don't know what they are dealing with. It is a procmail filter so they can't even detect that I filtered their spam.

If some non spaming company would like to purchase a licence for my spam filter, I will license it to you. If I find out that you are a spammer, I will take you down (digitally first then legally).

There are many black list servers. such as:

sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org
dnsbl-2.uceprotect.net
cbl.abuseat.org
relays.ordb.org

Maybe it could be be a simple as having the email servers hitting the websites that are referenced in the emails. The receipt of the email spam could result in the spammers targeted website being shut down by a denial of service attack. (maybe it should not be so harsh unless it was verified by a person, then it would be allowed) This would cause the viagra and the stock tip adds to shut down the server that was sending hundreds of thousands of emails.

If every email server sent a request to the web server that was advertized in the spam email, the espam servers being supported by the web servers would get overloaded and they would eventually fail.

This would cause the advertizers to stop using spammers because that advertizers do not want their web servers to get overloaded with inquiries from email servers.

Answer 2

First, just discarding spam is dangerous, the algorithm may make a mistake or a sender could use a format matching the spam blocks and you could be discarding something needed thus costing a company millions in lost revenue, they will sue. You can not block a whole server because one person uses it for sending spam. This penalises the legitimate user. Listing an IP address is useless as the real spam servers are moved from IP to IP at regular intervals (just a dns change). To attempt to destroy these severs would be illegal, you would end up in prison for a very very long time. Considering there are very secure mailer systems available and spam filters like spam assassin with long and reliable service behind them, you will be wasting your time.

Answer 3

Hi, I'm neither of the above, but hopefully I can contribute a little. What you wish to do is very noble, but I'm not sure it hasn't been done a thousand times before. Your best bet is to join the folks at Sourceforge (do a google). They have thousands of programmers like yourself working on thousands of open source projects. Get involved, learn what the others are up to and how advanced they are. You can go it alone or join others with similar ideas to build the ultimate spam attacker. I really do wish you luck, but I'd hate to see you trying to reinvent the wheel. Best wishes, John