Revenge of the spammed

Lycos claims to have come up with a novel solution to spam by letting the public get their revenge on the spammers.

The company has developed a downloadable screensaver which generates traffic on the websites of known spammers.

The screensaver is called 'Make Love, Not Spam' and Lycos Europe claimed that targeted sites are selected from secure international blacklists, which are used by leading portals and ISPs. This ensures that the software does not target innocent users.

Users can even submit the URLs of suspected spam sites through the Make Love, Not Spam website, with each target site checked manually to ensure that it is a genuine transgressor.

Malte Pollman, director of communication services at Lycos Europe, said: "By next year, it is estimated that 35 million spam emails will be sent every day.

"Now individual web users have a way of fighting back by making life more difficult for the people sending spam. We believe that the power of the internet community can be mobilised to stop the spammers.

"The combined effect of individual users targeting these sites will slow them down enormously and make it more difficult for them to clutter up our inboxes with unwanted rubbish.

"We cannot use this software to bring the spammers' sites down entirely as that would be illegal, but we can send a strong signal that spam is unacceptable."

Lycos Europe's 20 million users will all be invited to download the software, but it is available to anyone with an internet connection running either Windows or Mac OSX or Mac OS9 operating systems.

The screensaver is available here

See also:

Lycos pulls anti-spam screensaver after virus scare

Bad idea in the first place, say analysts  09 Dec 2004

Microsoft sues seven sex spammers

Emails in violation of the 'brown paper wrapper' rule  02 Dec 2004

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