What if your mail client, silently and in the background, fetched every URL that appeared in a spam message? Indeed, what if it did it a hundred times? And everyone else's did the same? The bandwidth costs of spammers would go through the roof. Oh, and your modem attached to your PC would autodial any free 800-style numbers, to drain the spammer's business further.
I guess the fatal flaw is that you can't be certain each URL or phone number is the spammer's. So just like the inclusion of random standard innocent texts in spam to defeat Bayesian filters, spammers would start to include random third party links and numbers, making the social cost unacceptable.
Oh well.
UPDATE: And another fatal flaw is that spammers have taken to using hijacked PCs etc. as the front ends to their web sites. At least the idea isn't as stupid as Microsoft's, which is to pose computationally expensive mathematical problems to mail servers before accepting a message (causing excessive CPU cost). All that does is kill every mailing list on the planet.
PS - See my original essay on the true solution to spam here...
Posted by Martin Geddes at 2:14 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telepocalypse.net/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/mgeddes/MT/mt-tb.cgi/102