Unsolicited email (known as spam) has become a major problem for businesses and individuals. It consumes unecessary time and space that could be better spent elsewhere. We propose to consume the spammer's time instead. By sending reponses back to the spammer they have to spend time going through the responses to determine the real ones. If enough false responses are sent back the spammers will have too many to go through and their productivity will go down. Our research project involves attacking two types of spam, "The Nigerian 419 Scan" and Forms and Phishing

The "Nigerian 419 Scam" email is a popular scamming email where the spammer gives a convincing story and tries to uses the recipient's guilt or greed to extract money. It's name comes from the Nigerian code for bank scams. An example would be an email from a "bank manager" claiming that he wants to smuggle out millions of dollars out of his bank, but he needs your help. We have built a tool to automatically respond to these emails and send back emails that ask for more information. The information the we will collect is the frequencies of emails as well as qualitative data from the emails (such as the false names given and the amount of money asked).

Our Form Fill program handles spam asking for sensitive information such as names, emails, phone numbers, and credit card numbers. The spammers can be businesses that use unsolicited emails for marketing or individuals looking to scam people. We want to collect the forms and determine what they are asking for. Then we will send the information back using our email address and phone numbers to solicit a response.