Dark Reading has reported that Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have created an anti-spam toolkit dubbed Spamalot. The array of tools aims to actively react to spammed emails by sending responses in an attempt to consume the spammer's resources. A similar initiative from Blue Security that generated a DoS attack in response to spam backfired when, in its turn, it attracted denial of service attacks.

Spamalot aims to increase the rate of false positive results of spam campaigns to the point where the authentic responses from victims become illegible to the spammers. "The goal of Spamalot is to consume as much human resources as possible of those who are sending spam," declared Peter Nelson, the head of the department of computer science at the University of Illinois.

Nelson stated that the overall purpose of the toolkit is to decrease the volume of spam while being integrated with traditional anti-spam filters. According to him, there is also a commercial aspect to Spamalot as the University is involved in negotiations with various financial organizations.