Tit for tat. An eye for an eye. Revenge is sweet. What goes around comes around. To spam or not to spam, that is the question.

According to recent reports, spammers have pushed their garbage on too many techno-geeks. Some now make it a mission in life to hunt the spammers down and punish them. And punish them and punish them.

There is a certain poetic justice in having the spammer’s tactics turned back on them, bringing down their systems as hard as the spammers brought down the systems of their victims.

As reported in the Palm Beach Post on May 20, 2003, anti-spammers tracked down a spammer hosting service and email bombed their Greece-hosted 184 servers to their knees. The report states that the service was down for 10 days while they dealt with the flood of revenge spam. Does that bring a tear of sympathy to my eye? Let’s just say that the tear in my eye is not a sympathy tear for the spammer and their host.

There is one big problem. Those who resort to such tactics are breaking the same laws their tormentors are breaking. Is it justified? No. Breaking the law in a tit-for-tat spam battle may be soul-satisfying, but in the end will likely prove a Pyhrric victory. Do I sympathize? Oh boy, do I ever.

Spamming the spammers is not a new tactic. A report in the Chicago Tribune from July of 2002 (www.chicagotribune.com/technology/chi-020701antispammers.story) says in part, “Still others employ more direct and aggressive tactics, such as giving spammers a taste of their own handiwork by sending streams of unwanted messages back to them or by sending e-mails with large file attachments that clog return e-mailboxes.”

The problem with this technique is that those that use this tactic are almost certainly violating the terms and conditions/acceptable use policies of their own ISP’s. In other words, they are doing the precise sort of damage to their own ISP that the spammers do, especially dealing with bounced messages and consumed bandwidth.

The solution is going to be a Federal law that inflicts severe criminal and civil penalties on spammers, especially those that deliberately forge headers and use other tactics to bypass blocks and filters. Those penalties will need to include large amounts of damages and a right of action for the recipients as well as the ISP’s that are targeted. Only then will groups and individuals have the incentive to devote significant amounts of time and money necessary to track down and sue the thieves, and to then track and seize their ill-gotten gains and personal assets. When the thieves that spam get hit hard in the pocket book, and spend time in the gray bar hotel, we will see an improvement. Until that happens, “do you want mustard with your spam?”.