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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?]
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Dev Teaches Bot to Talk Spammers' Ears Off
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
"The subspace _W inherits the other 8 properties of _V. And there aren't
even any property taxes."
-- J. MacKay, Mathematics 134b
(Score: 3, Insightful) by edIII on Wednesday September 28 2016, @07:39AM
Worse. You could just go with technically impossible and idiotic, which is true. It requires the actual expenditure of time and resources on behalf of the spam operators to even make a difference at all, and that's highly dubious. Accepting to addresses from outside sources would be ludicrous and irresponsible, and the git code looks like something to operate a honeypot. Amusingly this would just get you on the IP blacklists yourself and blocked from legitimate servers. The word for the traffic it generates is called Back Scatter, and it's bad [wikipedia.org].
Most emails are not seeking direct engagement as their goal, but to deliver malware, or surreptitiously seek information with phishing scams instead. Unless it's very specifically the Nigerian scammer type email where there is an actual human being waiting for the reply, this is spam itself the majority of the time its operating.
Besides, it's an art form that is rarely appreciated. I think of it as desperate African soap opera that is also interactive. Some people don't appreciate theater.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.