WebProNews

Internet portal Lycos has designed a new type of screensaver, one which constantly requests data from sites that sell items featured in spam emails.

Lycos hopes that their new offensive against spam will make the spammers monthly bandwidth bill sky rocket, by keeping their servers running 24/7.

"We've never really solved the big problem of spam which is that its so damn cheap and easy to do," said Malte Pollmann, spokesman for Lycos Europe.

"We've found a way to make it much higher cost for spammers by putting a load on their servers."

Lycos estimates that if enough enraged spam victims sign up and download the new tool, spammers could possibly end up paying for terabytes of data being sent out.

Jeremy Muncy is a staff writer for WebProNews.com