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DMCA vs. Spam?
from the would-that-work dept
The argument isn't all that well laid out in this article, but the writer is saying that we should look at spam as an intellectual property issue, and see if we can use things like the DMCA against spam - by saying that our email addresses are intellectual property. It's an interesting idea, but (1) I doubt it will work and (2) it raises a whole bunch of other problems. The article also describes another spam technique that goes one step beyond the spoofed "reply-to" line spams. What they do is figure out which email addresses are going to bounce - and then send the spam specifically to that email address, but spoof your address as the "from" line. This way, when sendmail bounces the messages as undeliverable... you get the spam as a bounce message. And, instead of having to worry about finding an open relay to send the spam, they're using someone's completely legitimate set up of sendmail to send the spam. Ouch.
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Using Bounce messages to spam
This kind of technique was one I first saw back in '99 when I managed a huge amount of email. School students will find any way they can to harass those that aren't in their clique. The first one seen of this type is the hardest to debug; it's got almost the fallout potential as when a miner intends to share really bad porn with a friend, but messes up both his TO: and From: lines.
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Re: Using Bounce messages to spam
Well, by that logic, deleting SPAM could also be a violation of the dmca
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the bounce technique
Although it is a nice idea, it seems to be much less efficient than an open relay. If you want to spam a million addresses, you have to make the message bounce a million times, tweaking the header each time. That's got to be more resource-intensive for the spammer than dropping the load on an open relay. Am I right?
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