Retaliating to spam.

How do you fight spam?

Not through regulation. Spammers will find loopholes and exploit them. You can plug the loophole, but then they'll find another one. And some spammers will just not care, try to avoid the cops. Sure, eventually they'll get caught, but for every spammer caught there's ten more waiting.

Not through technology; that's an arms race. Improve your filters, and the spammers will just modify their mails to slip through again.

I don't think it is possible to fight spammers. But you can take revenge...

Let's look at a typical nigerian scam:

From: foo@bar.baz
To: wouter@grep.be
Subject: PLEASE HELP
Date: some_date_in_the_future

Hi,

My name is <the name of a relative of someone rich who died>.

I have <some problem involving an amount of money that I cannot get
at>.

Could you please <do something which will cost you a lot of money>?

Thanks.

PS: please, reply on my private email address <scammer@scam.com>.

The important phrase is the last one: if you could please be so kind as to reply to their "private" email address. Obviously that email address is a throwaway one; but one would expect that they must read it and hope someone replies to it before the amount of spam on that address gets too high to reasonably be able to read it.

Which is the catch. I wonder how those spammers would react if I would start adding their "private" email addresses to some database and, rather than throwing away mails which are so obviously spam, start forwarding them to random addresses from that pool...