Friday, April 25, 2008

This link kills spam

If you link to this page, whenever a harvester visits your site, it gets filled up with superfluous email addresses. These email addresses change every time this page is visited.

(A sample of the emails are shown below. These emails continue on below the screen, but you can't see them to save space)
Contact us xcaigdogs@katucespnx.com
Contact us lbbjevpkk@ebkjbvpgkx.com
Alert our admin xatscaltn@llcmnltjeg.com
Contact us ihhrkdjrp@jrnjlimntg.com

Don't know if this works...will have to ask my son when he gets back from his meeting in Chicago


Email harvesting bots, otherwise known as data miners, follow links, grabbing email addresses out of each page it visits. When one of these bots comes to your site, all sites you've linked get crawled for email addresses.


This site renders these harvester's lists useless by filling them with invalid e-mail addresses. Once a spammer hits this site, they enter an infinite loop of randomly created email addresses (starting with the ones it generates when it first comes to the site) Once a mailing list has been poisoned with a number of invalid e-mail addresses, the resources required to send a message to this list increases, even though the number of valid recipients has not. This forces the spammer to exhaust more resources to send e-mail, in theory costing the spammer money and time. A best-case scenario would cause the spammer to throw out the mailing lists completely.

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