Brian Weinreich has been trolling spammers for two years using a bot that fires realistic and ridiculous replies to the pervasive online salespeople.
He simply forwards unwanted emails to a specific address and the bot takes over. Offering the spammers open ended questions that they fall over themselves to answer.
My favourite bit from Brian's blog is "after the first month, I didn't have to feed the Looper any more. People were just spamming it on their own.". The spammers were selling on the list of "bitters" to other spammers.
The code is on GitHub
[editor's note: we covered a somewhat similar story here. Does this one have the same ethical implications?]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 28 2016, @01:36AM
As long as the robots don't spam me, I guess that's OK?
Now, if the robots want to talk dirty, maybe that's something that might be popular?