Spam Research Tool
SpamVampire
Many thanks to SpamVampire
and artists against 419 (LadVampire)
Run the Spam Research Tool with today's URLs
Look in the archive
Q: What is the Spam Research Tool? What is a SpamVampire?
A: Since spam emails contain explicit invitations to visit sponsoring websites,
anyone may freely accept such invitations and examine the contents of such
websites to their heart's content. The Spam Research Tool is a variant of
the SpamVampire genre of tools that load files from selected websites.
Q: What's the point?
A: The point is to learn more about spam. If the bandwidth costs of the
websites that sponsor spam increase, that's completely incidental. Since
we are all negatively affected by spam clogging our mailboxes, it should
come as a surprise to no one that increasing numbers of us have a keen
curiosity about spam-sponsoring websites, their graphics, and their
bandwidth. How do they do what they do? Since it's too
much trouble to click incessantly on spam links, various tools offer help
by significantly automating the process. The SpamVampire genre of tools
presents thumbnails of the graphics loaded from spamsites. Since website
contents may change, the tools reload the files from time to time to make
sure you don't miss anything.
Q: What effect can this have on the websites that sponsor spam?
A: Most bandwidth consumers are subject to purchasing bandwidth on
what's known as the 95/5 plan. This is the way most ISPs purchase their
bandwidth and they pass the same scheme on to their customers. Read Item
4 on this page ... http://www.colomax.com/colocation/faq/billing.aspx
What this means is that to totally "hose" the economics of a web site customer
who is on this plan, 37 hours of high bandwidth utilization will cause them to
be billed as if the entire MONTH of 720 hours was used at this super-high rate.
That immediately changes the entire economic outlook for anyone hosting a web
site. Since it's probably possible to deliberately pull several hundred times
more bandwidth than normal from a site, it's possible -- in less than just two
days -- to cause the bandwidth charges for an entire MONTH of a 95/5 billed
site to be many times higher than usual. Since the ISP has to pay
their peering partner for this usage, so does the ISP's customer.
Q: It sounds like this will make sending spam more expensive, since the
spamvertized URLs will quickly appear in various SpamVampire pages, increasing
traffic to the spamsites.
A: Yes, so anyone interested in researching spam in this manner should do it
while there is still spam to study. Don't be surprised if use of this and
similar tools results in a sharp drop in spam in your mailbox or received
at your domain.
Q: So, does it work?
A: Indeed, it seems to. The originator of the canonical SpamVampire claims to
have experienced a better than 100-fold decrease in their
rolling monthly
spam receive rate.
(Note that the last 30 days of the graph is an extrapolation of current data.)
Q: How do I put the Spam Research Tool to work for me?
A: If you wish, you can run the Spam Research Tool directly from the link below.
The page you connect to below is updated from time to time from spamsite URLs
extracted from spam received at various domains hosted here.
It is highly recommended, however, that you grab the source
code of one or another of the SpamVampire tools, edit the source code to reflect
the spammers that are bothering you, and run it yourself. These tools are merely
web pages, so they run just as well from your desktop as from a website, so
even if you don't have a website, you can modify and run them yourself.