Most of the spam that hits my mailbox these days is the “Contact us urgently for your $1.5 million” type rubbish. Everything else seems to get caught by my email provider. I guess that the 419 looks like something that may be legitimate, so they let it through. Sending the mails on to email providers to shut down mailboxes is a time consuming affair and is like trying to stamp out little fires that keep spreading – it tries to cure the symptoms rather than the problem.
So what’s the underlying problem with the 419 emails? It is profitable for a guy in some third world country to scam the Unsavvy. Send out a hundred thousand emails, and the people who email you back are ripe for the picking. Now, what if the guy started getting a huge number of fake personal details that he follows up only to find that they’re crap. The cost of doing the 419 automatically goes up.
The idea: a 419 killer service. You forward the email to the killer mailbox. It works out whether it’s dealing with a legitimate 419 email, and if so adds the from and reply-to addresses to a list. It then periodically generates rubbish personal details that it forwards in an authentic looking reply message to those addresses. Now instead of having a few legitimate details, they’re hidden in the hundreds that these guys need to go through to find an actual person. The result: an increased cost of doing 419s, and hopefully getting these people to do something else with their time.