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

But what can you do about it?

[Tuxinatorium]

Unfortunately, there is still no law against email harvesting, so there is nothing you can do to them unless you want a little vigilante justice.

Re: I say...

[gidds]

BrightMail, too. My ISP uses it - it traps about 70% of my spam. The great thing is that it has no false positives, so it just shunts every spam it identifies off to a separate mailbox which you need never bother with - you don't spend time or bandwith downloading it. (A few times a year I take a look at the stuff it's recently trapped just to check, but there's never been a single valid mail.)

Re:I don't know if this would work but...

[utd-blaze]

I don't think a list of phony e-mail adresses is going to put a dent in an industry that will send an e-mail to every possible adress on a popular domain in the hopes that a small fraction of those adresses will belong to real people.