Kill Spam @ Home?

February 17th, 2005: Today I put an email address to sleep. It was suffering from a terminal spam infection, there was nothing else to do.

You can't get at the spammers by flooding them with spam. But wouldn't it be possible to get them at the other end of the pipeline? Not where the spam comes from, but where they want you to go to? Spam is intended to steer you to a website. A website is vulnerable to a DDS attack…

Here's the idea: all over the world, participating computers have a small piece of software running on them. When email arrives, spam is directed automatically or manually to a spam folder. The software extracts target web addresses from the mail in the folder and adds them to a hit list. When a computer is idle, the software sends repeated requests to addresses on the list. The sites collapse under the strain of all those requests. After a couple of days, the site is removed from the list, unless more spam arrives with the same target.

Desired result: sending spam cripples your site, not sending spam gets it back on line.

So why wouldn't this work?