Journal TPFH's Journal: Competitor Spamming (It was only a matter of time.) 1
I've now started tweaking with my spamassasin user_prefs such that once someone spams me, the domain name they are advertising will give future emails a +3 score. (Also note that I try to whitelist EVERYONE I correspond with.)
body ANNOYINGDOMAIN01
/candypersonal\.com/i
score ANNOYINGDOMAIN01 3
describe ANNOYINGDOMAIN01 domain name found in spam in the past
I still like to do a quick googlegroups and look at the site before I insert it. Today I found this
As a result of someone's evil plot, a series of SPAM messages have been recently sent on behalf of our company. We are strongly confused about true reasons of this severe violation of strict WWW principles. However, we are inclined to believe the people responsible for this are likely to be our competitors. The SPAM campaign was deliberately carried out with the direct reference to our company to destroy our clean reputation.
Please disregard and delete the messages you have received recently that were allegedly sent by us. We have never used SPAM as a means of achieving anything, moreover, we are active members of many anti-spam organizations, as well as SPEWS.ORG since 2001. Hence, we contribute to combating SPAM in any possible way we can.
I'm inclined to give them the bennefit of the doubt. I suppose that it is possible they were responsible, but put up a disclaimer on the front page to avoid retaliation, but there is no way to be certain.
I have predicted in the past that this will be the future of spamming. If it comes true things will get really ugly. But someday, and it might be soon, the scum sucking spammers will finally realize that people hate spam, and turn from selling it as advertising, to ruining people's competition.
It will certainly make spam fighting more complicated.
Nice (Score:2)
...but I see spam more as an immediate payoff (sell lUsers cheap junk) than a tool for corporate malfeasance (spoof spam). The latter takes much longer to pay off, if ever.