Re: [OFFTOPIC] Spamcop

[Andrew Clausen <clausen@gnu.org>]

On Thu, Sep 12, 2002 at 09:13:17PM -0300, Rik van Riel wrote:
> Not always.  Many spammers have started to harvest not just
> single email addresses, but from/to address PAIRS.

Look on the bright side: it costs spammers a lot more this way.

Spammers send big lists of names to relays, which costs O(N)
bandwidth and other resources... a very low O(N), since they
are bundled together.  With this pair system, it becomes harder
(more expensive) to batch things up.  [Is this a fair assessment?
Or is one-to-one spamming low-cost nowadays?]

I guess they might start finding a vertex cover (i.e. the minimal
set of vertices such that the union of those vertex neighbourhoods
== the set of all vertices) That looks NP-complete to me, but you
can probably approximate it enough to make it efficient.  So maybe
there is no bright side :(

Has anyone seen this in the wild?

Cheers,
Andrew