Re: TMDA (was: new spam functionality added)

[David Masterson <dmaster@synopsys.com>]

>>>>> Stainless Steel Rat writes:

> * prj@po.cwru.edu (Paul Jarc)  on Mon, 05 Aug 2002
> | In doing so, they would give up their anonymity.

> Bah.  Spammers use throwaway accounts.  So what if they lose the
> anonymity of a single Hotmail address.  Nothing stops them from
> randomly generating hundreds of others.

Do Hotmail (or Yahoo) accounts allow autoconfirmers?

> | We'd be able to find them and report them (and blacklist them).

> Reporting doesn't much work anymore.  Too many ISPs simply ignore
> spam complaints.

Thus blacklisting.

> Blacklisting throwaway addresses is pointless when spammers can
> generate all the Hotmail and Yahoo addresses they need.

But they have to work harder to do it.  If spammers do as you say to
"get around" TMDA, the user simply blacklists them with the first spam
to get through.  So spam, if not eliminated, is cut down, but the work
of the spammer goes up.

Of course, you could also do things to prevent auto-confirmers from
working (like random confirmation messages and rotating confirm email
addresses), but then the regular people can't hide TMDA behind an
auto-confirmer either.

-- 
David Masterson                David DOT Masterson AT synopsys DOT com
Sr. R&D Engineer               Synopsys, Inc.
Software Engineering           Sunnyvale, CA