Slashdot Mirror


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.)"

2 of 252 comments (clear)

  1. But what can you do about it? by Tuxinatorium · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re:I don't know if this would work but... by utd-blaze · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Do me a favor and double it!