Wow! What if there were a grass-roots movement to spam the spammers out of existence -- or at least make their efforts less profitable -- by making the scammers work so much harder to discern the truly gullible from the faux naive spammer-jammers?

The "Porcine Princess Chronicles" is the funniest thing I've read in a while. As far as inconveniencing spammers goes, my roommate wrote an html page that generates 2000 random but plausible email addresses every time it gets scanned. His idea was to have everyone append this code to their web sites so that spammers would get deluged with false emails. I'm not sure of the logistics. Would this do much, even if used on a wide scale?

Ahh, spambait.

If the script creates fake addresses at real domain names, then the mail servers that handle incoming mail at those domain names will still have to sort the real messages from the old ones. But if the doman names are fake, then the spammer's outgoing server won't be able to send them anywhere, and the bounced messages coming back to the spammer won't inconvenience anyone but the spammer's outgoing mail server (and anyone else who might happen to depend on it). It would cut down the spammer's return on investment, making the spammer have to work a bit harder. If everyone did that, then perhaps some bright spammer would figure out how to recognize a page that has been stuffed with randomly generaged e-mails. But I bet it feels good to know that you are making spammers' lives just a bit more difficult, without having to lift a finger.