Spam: Poison Pill

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A common way for spammers to create their vast lists of email ...
isto cull web pages for ... tags.
There are many ... ...
for small to huge costs, which will do this A common way for spammers to create their vast lists of email addresses isto cull web pages for "mailto:" tags. There are many different programs,available for small to huge costs, which will do this automatically, easilyand efficiently.I monitor my web site log files on a regular basis, and I'm always amazed atthe vast numbers of spam harvesting programs that regularly scan my pages.Not only do these obnoxious things steal email addresses, they use bandwidthwhich I pay for without any kind of compensation.
I put up my web pages forpeople to read not for some scumbag spammer to scan them.There are many ways to combat the spammer. None of these methods areperfect.
As in any war, both sides are continually developing new weapons touse against the other. New methods work for a short time until the enemycomes up with countermeasures and overcomes the weapon.One of the more effective ways to confuse the spammer (not hard because theydon't tend to be very bright) is the "poison pill" defense.
This consists ofhanding the spam harvesting robots some pages which appear juicy, full ofyummy email addresses ripe for the picking.The email address on these pages are fake. They have nothing to do withreality and exist only to choke the spam robots, causing them to overflowand possibly even crash.Here's how a typical poison pill works.
A script is created which performsall of these tasks. It is important that the scripting be done on theserver, so CGI, ASP, PHP or a similar scripting language must be used.Server side scripting must be used because many spam robots are not smartenough to understand client-side scripting languages such as JavaScript.The script creates a page which appears in all ways to be a normal documentin a web site.
The page may include some text informing human visitors ofthe intention (this is important so any people who see the page are notconfused).It also needs to include a meta tag informing all robots not to index thepage. This is critical, as you do not want robots such as googlebot orscooter (the spiders for Google and Altavista, respectively) seeing thisstuff.
Don't worry, spam harvesters ignore these meta tags.The script gives the page a name, usually randomly picked from a database ormade up somehow, and fills it with a few dozen (at the most) emailaddresses. These email addresses are cleverly created to appear perfectlyvalid but actually are useless - they are just made up.Links to other fake pages are created for the spam harvester to follow.
Anyrobot (or human being, for that matter) that follow these links will findsimilar pages, full of desirable email addresses.Depending upon the robot, it's possible the spammer could gather tens ofthousands of totally fake, unusable email addresses before his robot blowsitself out of the water. It's even better if the robot survives, as thespammer now wastes his time sending messages to nonexistent email addresses.In the meantime, the harvester has been lured away from valid pages whichmay or may not contain email addresses.My site, Internet Tips and Secrets, uses one of these poison pills.
It iscalled wpoison and it really works well. If you want to see it, look at thispage.http://www.internet-tips.net/cgi-bin/guestlist.plIf you want to get a copy for yourself, check out the wpoison page.http://www.monkeys.com/wpoison/This is just another weapon in the war against spam.Is it effective?I know from personal experience that it does trap spam robots, and it doesseem to lure them away from real, useful email addresses.Is it ethical?I believe so, as long as you are careful to include the meta tags to inform"good" robots to leave the pages alone as well as some text to let yourvisitors know what's going on.It's not as satisfying as spamcop.net, and there is no where near thatpleasant glow of success upon learning that some scum spammer has had hisISP cancel his account, but the poison pill is useful nonetheless.
My adviceis to include it in your arsenal along with the other weapons and tools atyour disposal.To see a list of article available for reprint, you can send an email to: mailto:[email protected]?subject=send_article_listor visit http://internet-tips.net/requestarticles.htm Article Tags: Poison Pill, Email Addresses, Spam Robots Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com .