Isn a denial of service attack on spammers illegal?
This one would be uncoordinated, and so distributed that no one client would have to submit too many http requests. I’m not proposing that a given filter hit a spammer’s site with 10,000 http requests. More like a couple hundred, at most. It would be hard for someone to claim you were mounting a DoS attack on them for submitting a couple hundred http requests. If a couple hundred requests is a DoS attack, then I have several times been guilty of DoSing eBay. In any case, spammers like to keep a low profile. I can’t imagine spammers, especially spammers based offshore, trying to invoke the protection of the law. They’ve probably already been victims of conventional DoS attacks, and I haven’t heard of any of them doing this. This could be used to DoS innocent victims. That’s the point of the blacklist. A site doesn’t get pounded simply by being mentioned in a spam. It has to be mentioned in a spam and be on the blacklist.
