Spam the Spammers

I got some spam yesterday. I run SpamAssassin aggressively, so I don't see most of the spam directed at me. But this one was different. It was different because it went to my pager. That' right, my cell phone got all exited about it. And I got VERY, VERY PISSED OFF about it.

I decided that this particular spammer had crossed the line. (In fact, I later found that they had spammed ALL of my virtual domains). It was time to fight back. This spammer was also a little strange in that they asked you to reply via e-mail if you are interested in their "offer", so I did.

I wrote a Perl script using Net::SMTP that talked directly to their mail server and delivered messages to them on my behalf. In fact, it would do that in a loop. I let it run for a few hours from a few machines. By my calculations, I had sent them about 50MB of messages (a few thousand, in fact). I could have sent a log more, but there's a lot of hops between me and their server (hosted in Asia, of course).

I have access to A LOT of network bandwidth. They probably didn't expect that.

I figure that they'd either null-route my servers or they'd get the point and take me off their list. Either way, I'm happy. But there's no way to be sure, so maybe I'll fire it up again later today and send a few hundred thousand "did you take me off your list? I await your reply!" messages.

I really hate spammers.

Posted by jzawodn at July 11, 2002 04:58 PM