Lycos sets hippies loose on spam

The software, Make Love, Not Spam sits on the individual's PC and, when the machine is not being used, generates traffic on the sites of known spammers, slowing them down and making them more difficult to run.

Malte Pollman, director communication services at Lycos Europe, said: "By next year, it is estimated that 35 million spam emails will be sent every day. Now individual web users have a way of fighting back, by making life more difficult for the people sending spam."

The "Make Love, Not Spam" software is a downloadable screen saver. When the individual PC is idle the screensaver generates HTTP requests to known spam sites.

Lycos said the sites are selected from secure international black lists to ensures no innocent users are targeted.

Users can submit the URLs of suspected spam sites through the site but they will not be added to the target list until they have been individually verified.

The portal’s estimated 20 million users will all be invited to download the software, but it is available to anyone with an internet connection running either Windows or Mac OSX or Mac OS9 operating systems.

At regular intervals, sites will be taken out of the cycle of attacks to ensure they are not entirely brought down by the software.

"We cannot use this software to bring the spammers' sites down entirely as that would be illegal, but we can send a strong signal that spam is unacceptable," Pollman added.