Honeypot For Identifying Email-Harvesters

Cheese Man writes "Mark Pilgrim describes a simple way to identify email-harvesters: "In each page I serve, I include a bogus email address, encoded with the date of access as well as the host IP address ... This has allowed me to trace spam back to specific hosts and/or robots." There's even a simple one-line example done with PHP. (Thanks to BoingBoing for the links.)"

Comments

Re: wpoison

[Black Parrot]

> Try wpoision, it's a CGI script to generate a random set of email address, infinitely deep. Very fun.

I'm trying to invent an e-mail address that explodes if anyone tries to use it.

Re: Spammers are pretty simple (for now)

[Black Parrot]

> I am plesently suprised that my anti-spam encoded email address still has not been spammed. [...] It wouldnt take much to find and decode most of the simple spam-protected email addresses. [...] But pretty soon I suspect we will get much cleverer email collecting tools and the problem is going to get to the scale of the virus/anti-virus stage.

Then we'll start putting "nospam" in our real addresses!