FireFox31 said:

But seriously, aren't there any bright anti-spammers who could just take down this guy's servers? Can't a small army of anti-spam hackers just track the mail headers back to the sending servers and take those servers down? It could be a counter-spam hacking movement. I mean, all these hackers are so busy writing viruses to see which can score higher on Symantec's Security Report, why not write viruses to toast spam friendly ISPs?

Um, you should not fight abuse with abuse. Do the right thing -- report the spammer to his/her ISP and have the account terminated. If the ISP is spammer friendly, learn to add them to your blocklists.

For more anti-spam info, check out:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&group=news.admin.net-abuse.email

as well as:

http://www.spews.org/

_owen

Oh, those naughtly people!!

"Revenge is a dish best served cold"

But seriously, aren't there any bright anti-spammers who could just take down this guy's servers?

If you read the article, you'll find that he's using multiple servers all over the world.

Theoretically, one could launch multiple massive DDoS attacks against these spamming servers, but most of them are probably already hardened against that sort of thing. I would imagine that spam servers are among the most frequently-attacked type of server there is.

Do the right thing -- report the spammer to his/her ISP and have the account terminated.

Most of these spammers are their own ISP.

If you read the article, you'll find that he's using multiple servers all over the world.

And many, many hijacked open relays, and open proxy servers, In most cases, you'd only be attacking computers that don't have anything to do with the spammer.

Most of these spammers are their own ISP.

Well...That's not fully true, they have to get their internet connection from somewhere, and that means a connection with at least one other ISP.

Spam Assassin requires Outlook... I'm not about to start using Outlook on my home machines just to use Spam Assassin.

Mailwasher seems to work very well but needs a few features (at least the older version I'm running). I'll update to the new version and see if I can have it work as automated as I need it.

My domain host (using my own email domain) has also updated their web mail program - it now supports a couple of dozen spam lists and servers as well as manual spamcop forwarding. Out of the 60 emails sitting in my inbox this weekend, it left only 3 SPAM messages after turning on a few of the lists (I'll have to go through and turn on some of the others).

I could easily eliminate most of my SPAM with procmail on the host server, but I've been ultra-lazy to set this up. I get mail to two domains in my account, both of them supporting catch-all addressing. Most of the spam comes to a few addresses, so even matching those eliminates most of it (it's a good idea to create throw-away addresses when using your email address for something that doesn't need a permanent record).

Bruno