Background information for "Spam the spammers" about requests-for-research HOT 4 CLOSED

So, as much as I like the idea of Spamming the Spammers I think replying on Spams in a large scale fashion would hurt the wrong people, who are not even aware that they send Spams.

As another person who was interested in the "Spamming the Spammers" idea, I agree full-heartily with this post. However, "text generation" could still be useful for a whole variety of other fields (robot-journalism, stories for procedurally-generated games, machine-generated literature, other generative arts, etc.). Thus, research in the development of a machine that can generate convincing email responses would be useful...so long as it never actually gets used to send real e-mails.

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Thank you @freach for your comment.

Some fraction of spam emails that I am receiving require reply. Such emails could be automatically replied. As you described, responding to all other spam emails would harm users.

What's the fraction of spam emails that require user to reply ?

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Sure @wojzaremba .The request to reply makes sense if the Spammer wants to validate real addresses, a so to say opt-in mechanism. I also saw Spams, which didn't really advertise for services or the like, but wanted to suggest trust worthiness. Spams which are used for social engineering, usually highly targeted. I saw very good phishing Emails targeting services like PayPal, which required a reply.

There is also a very classic example for people using services from valid businesses to do very shady Email marketing. People would go to companies like Mailchimp, use a dirty list of Email addresses (often bought from shady people) and use the services of the Email marketing company to validate Email addresses by sending out a marketing campaign and check which addresses delivered, opened or replied. Those people cause a lot of trouble for companies like Mailchimp and the anti abuse departments are usually very quick to identify and ban those kind of customers.

So there are a couple of examples, where a reply would make sense, but detecting those kind of Emails, where a reply would cause a little trouble for the Spammer, is an other not so trivial problem.

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I see that there are many components that are not necessary research related. I am going to remove this task.

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