> From: Lars Wirzenius <liw@iki.fi>
> >
> > Richard Gooch:
> >> over a month). Friends, if you can spare a minute, please
> >> send a "please don't spam" message together with a uuencoded
> >> copy of /usr/bin/emacs to the follow addresses:
> >
> > No! Do _NOT_ mailbomb. Ever. It doesn't help, and it will disturb
> > other people.
>
> You are a kind person, but this is the Internet. It is unfortunate
> that mailbombing is often the only solution, and it _does_ work.
It did help, back when the net was smaller. It no longer does.
If you want to do something productive, go look at the groups (and FAQs)
in the news.net-abuse.* hierarchy.
One of the things you'll be learning there is that people who mailbomb,
for whatever reason, are considered to be abusers just like the spammers,
by most of the admins.
The reason mailbombs don't help are very simple.
Most spammers fall in one of two categories:
A. Spammer's sysadmin is the usual sane sysadmin. Spammer's account will
be toast as soon as said sysadmin learns about spam. Any mailbombs will
either annoy the sysadmin, or you when they bounce back, but not the
spammer.
B. Spammer's sysadmin is in bed with the spammer. Either the machine
doesn't accept mail at the usual addresses anyway, or it's a big machine
with a good net connection that isn't impressed by your mailbomb in any
form. It doesn't annoy the spammer, in any case. Some of the most
persistent spammers fall in this category.
A very few spammers are left for category
C. Spammer's sysadmin is clueless.
In this case, we need to convince the sysadmin why toasting the spammer is
a good thing. We can't do that by sending mail bombs - that'll only
convince him we're the bad boys.
> Mailbombing hint: Send many small messages with different "From:"
> lines. Professional spam sites drop attachments in the bitbucket
> automatically and only keep one mail with a given "From:" line.
> Mangle the headers just like they do and keep the message small.
Mailbombing hint: If you mailbomb, you stand a *very* good chance at
loosing your account. If you forge your address in the bargain, its
practically a certainty.
Just don't do it.
> ObLinuxKernel: can we hack mailbomb code right into the TCP/IP
> stack? It would get better performance than a normal program. :-)
> Maybe the code should open millions of connections from a whole
> 8 bits worth of IP addresses, then just leave the connections
> open. It could send a few characters slowly to stop any timeout.
If you want to kill Linux, that's certainly a way to do it.
Do us all a favor. Go away, and never come back. I mean it.
MfG Kai