Well I finally did it... I got so sick of spam I finally did something about it instead of just moaning. I went to Spam Bully, downloaded and installed their 14 day trial version, introduced it to some spam in my deleted folder and hey presto: no more spam.
One feature of Spam Bully that appealed to me was it's ability to "punish" spammers. If you receive a piece of spam with a link to a website and instruct the program to punish it, Spam Bully will invisibly click on the link "a few times". This has the effect of increasing bandwidth usage without generating income for the spammer, making their spam site less financially viable. Once a few hundred thousand people have anti-spam software which punishes spammers in this way, any spam site, once identified and punished, will effectively start to generate it's own DoS attack. Ha Ha ! Take that, you spamming SoBs.
But...
I told a friend who works in computing about "my little victory". He frowned deeply and described the following scenario...
"Suppose one of your competitors, who runs a rival business with an online store and, like you, is dependent upon the web to make a living, decides to screw you over - bigtime. What he does is buys a piece of spamming software, creates (for example) some really offensive porno spam messages, which contain links to your site and then mails it to the world. The people who receive it will be understandably shocked and those who have a punishment option on their anti-spam software may well decide that this is the time to use it.
The result ? All of a sudden, out of the blue, your site starts to experience something that, at first, appears to be a classic DoS attack, with squillions of clicks hitting your site's server and doing no business. You take steps to track down the source of the attack, but to your horror realise that it isn't coming from just one, or even a few computers, it's coming from thousands of computers all over the world and there is nothing you can do to stop it" /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/ooo.gif /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/drool.gif /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/faint.gif
Alright, I've already used this function on the spam in my deleted folder, but now that I know this I will be very cautious about using it in the future. After all, there are enough features within Spam Bully to prevent the cursed stuff ever being a problem again (I hope) which, on reflection is all I really want to happen.
So beware, by "punishing those damn spammers", you could wind up as an unwitting pawn in someone else's sicko cyber game.
One feature of Spam Bully that appealed to me was it's ability to "punish" spammers. If you receive a piece of spam with a link to a website and instruct the program to punish it, Spam Bully will invisibly click on the link "a few times". This has the effect of increasing bandwidth usage without generating income for the spammer, making their spam site less financially viable. Once a few hundred thousand people have anti-spam software which punishes spammers in this way, any spam site, once identified and punished, will effectively start to generate it's own DoS attack. Ha Ha ! Take that, you spamming SoBs.
But...
I told a friend who works in computing about "my little victory". He frowned deeply and described the following scenario...
"Suppose one of your competitors, who runs a rival business with an online store and, like you, is dependent upon the web to make a living, decides to screw you over - bigtime. What he does is buys a piece of spamming software, creates (for example) some really offensive porno spam messages, which contain links to your site and then mails it to the world. The people who receive it will be understandably shocked and those who have a punishment option on their anti-spam software may well decide that this is the time to use it.
The result ? All of a sudden, out of the blue, your site starts to experience something that, at first, appears to be a classic DoS attack, with squillions of clicks hitting your site's server and doing no business. You take steps to track down the source of the attack, but to your horror realise that it isn't coming from just one, or even a few computers, it's coming from thousands of computers all over the world and there is nothing you can do to stop it" /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/ooo.gif /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/drool.gif /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/faint.gif
Alright, I've already used this function on the spam in my deleted folder, but now that I know this I will be very cautious about using it in the future. After all, there are enough features within Spam Bully to prevent the cursed stuff ever being a problem again (I hope) which, on reflection is all I really want to happen.
So beware, by "punishing those damn spammers", you could wind up as an unwitting pawn in someone else's sicko cyber game.