Spam Poison

[John Floyd]

This is a Neat One Tham I am Using On my Sites

Fight Back Against Spammers

http://english-160515031970.spampoison.com/

WWW Robots (also called wanderers, spiders, crawlers, or bots) are programs that crawl the Web continually retrieving linked pages. When a spammer's bot visits your website, blog, forum, etc, all pages and sites linked to it will be searched looking for email addresses.
Now you can fight back against their robots!

These links will redirect email harvesting bots to trap sites that will feed it with an almost infinite loop of dynamically generated fake email addresses, mostly on known spammer owned domains! This will render their harvested lists practically useless and of no commercial value.

[Wiz Feinberg]

The entire planet would need to run Spam Poison to have any noticeable effect on email address harvesting. One website out of a million won't make an iota of difference to spammers. All spam is sent from Botnetted personal computers, unbeknownst to their owners. Spam is sent to harvested recipient email addresses, using forged sender names and addresses. If those infected PCs are sent updated templates with imaginary domains and accounts, those spam messages will bounce, as 550 undeliverable. However, since the "reply to" accounts in bot spam are also usually forged, innocent victims will receive the delivery failure notices, not the botnetted computers owners.

This is known as a Joe Job.

[John Cipriano]

You didn't fill out the sheet, Wiz.

"Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Extreme profitability of spam"

http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

Now John, if you don't mind spending some bandwidth to trip up spammers, kudos. But as Wiz said, a lot of spam comes from botnets, so the spammers themselves are protected from any sort of damage. I imagine that on their end it's mostly a financial transaction now: rent some botnet time, buy a list of working addresses, sell some "ad space."

I will say though that honeypots are one of the few solutions that don't create larger problems than the one they're trying to solve.

[Wiz Feinberg]

>:-)

You didn't fill out the sheet, Wiz.

snip

I will say though that honeypots are one of the few solutions that don't create larger problems than the one they're trying to solve.

In the sense of full disclosure, I am running several honeypots. I am an active contributing member of Project Honeypot and routinely send spambots to them. I run Spam Poison links on my blog pages, for the heck of it. I also run my own cgi spam poison script that I got when I was a member of the now-defunct Harvester Project.

Finally, I report all spam that makes it through my MailWasher Pro auto-delete filters to SpamCop.