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Where Is Spam When You Want It?
Sean writes "In a complete twist to what everybody else is trying to do these days, I need to attract spam to an e-mail address for a research survey I am conducting. I have submitted a few articles to a handful of Usenet groups, and I have signed up to some general mailing lists but so far I have nothing to show for it. How come by personal account gets 100+ spam each day yet when I try to find it I get nothing? Where should I post my address so that it attracts spam?"
Sign up for an account there, forward the spam to your new mailbox and start following links to advertisements and such. If they ask for your email address, give it to them. Won't take long.
I get spam from my domain registry, which has an email associated with it. I get the Nigerian stuff this way.
Make an ebay account with your email address in it and just start bidding. This is an excellent way to ruin an otherwise perfectly good email address. I was doing all right on the spam front until I did this. Big whoops. *hits head on desk* Yeah, stupid me.
You'll quickly become inundated with "How-tos" to Ebay, "official" emails from Ubid by people attempting to fraudulently gain access to your personal information, more tips-and-tricks, more offers from uBid, and of course a plethora of marvelous online drugstore advertisements.
Enjoy.
also try porn sites, gambling sites, and more importantly, paste it on slashdot. My spam trap address here gets hit ALL the time, usually several times a day, which has helped me greatly in tuning my firewall.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
In your own inbox, get a couple of hundreds of spam.
.....
Take the urls (DO NOT CLICK ON THEM) and strip them of the stuff after the '?'
Go to each of those 'unsibscribe' pages and put the test account in the email to be removed box.
Its the best way to get spam. The spammers will generally use it as confirmation that your address does indeed exist, and theyll happily put you in their alive list, where you are shure to get everything they are selling.
I was in the exact same situation, actually, and found spamarchive.org to be very helpful. Any one of the files on their ftp site should have enough spam to keep you busy for a while.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
- Post a comment on Slashdot with the e-mail address visible
- If on a popular e-mail provider such as AOL, Hotmail, or Yahoo, put up a profile and go to a chat room.
- Allow your e-mail address to be listed on any of the directories.
- Put your e-mail on a Geocities website.
Put it on a web page which gets any moderate amount of traffic. I did that with some spam-bait addresses, and it's amazing how much they generate. In a few months, they've identified over 22,000 unique servers sending spam.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
I made up a semi-bogus email addy, it's real in that mail sent to it gets to me, but when I'm done, I'll flush it down the tubes.
I used it to attract spam so that I could train spamassassin for my use and for a few friends and family.
I went and dropped it all over usenet in the pr0n groups, went to every viagra site I could find, clicked on every banner add I saw.
It took a few weeks but I finally got the desired results. You'll have to put up with some extremely offensive email for awhile so make sure the wife and kids can't get to it during this phase.
After doing this for a few weeks I was getting 50+ spams a day. Now that I have spamassassin all tuned up I just don't check mail on that account. Once I feel that I no longer have the need to tweak SA, I'll just dump the account..
Too bad this doesn't work for TV commercials...
HEY! How about an app that, er, nevermind...
Isn't this (more or less) the point of a honeypot? Granted, the owners would presumably step in if they saw anything extremely dangerous going on, but this is fairly common,tried-and-true practice. Ever read _The Cuckoo's Egg_?
I have an address I used for about three months on usenet, only in the comp.lang hierarchy.
I may have used it for a few web sites, but the only one I recall is a local political organization which I doubt would have sold, or had the expertise to sell, its list. Still, the data is tainted, and I can't say it all comes from usenet.
According to DejaGoogle, I last used it 18 April 2002, and it was last referenced in a follow-up message 5 May 2002. I first used it 15 February 2002.
For a while I had my ISP forward mail to that address to "nothing" until I worried it might be piling up on the server somewhere (I don't know what forwarding to "nothing" means in the ISP's web control panel). So there are no messages for most of the month of May 2003.
Disregarding the emails from the political organization, there are 1733 emails; the earliest is dated 16 July 2002, the lastest today 21 Sep 2003. (There are probably earlier emails to this address which have been archived.)
So that's a span of 432 days, not subtracting the period when I wasn't having the email forwarded. Again not subtracting the un-forwarded days, that's ~4 per day.
Note that this is only spam to this particular "sacrificial" address; it does not count the large amount of spam that, thanks to having some idiots as "friends", hits my "real" address.
I have not been subject to any dictionary attacks on my domain name, but I have gotten about 105 spams to admin@mydomain in the same time period. This pushes the daily average to ~4.25/day.
Since I started getting a lot of spam, I've made a practice of assigning each commerical contact or mailing list a different address (theirdomain.tld@mydomain.tld generally); surprisingly, these get very little spam, despite getting large volumes of legitimate mail each day.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
I think you have to wait, as from what I understand most of the people who spam actually buy spam lists from other people. The spam lists seem to be compiled like phone books, so they send out batches of addresses like every month or so. I'm sure your mailbox will be stuffed to the breaking point about two months from now.
So you want a lot of spam, do ya?
p e= www
http://www.spamcop.net/w3m?action=inprogress&ty
That's Spamcop's list of spam-vertised web sites. All of those sites have submission forms; just put the email address in there and you'll be rockin' and rollin' within a few hours. I got into a 'spam war' with one of my roommates back in college, and with that Spamcop list I was able to render his email account COMPLETELY useless within a couple of hours (If you're reading this, sorry 'bout that Brian... )
Speaking of spam, on a random side note, I've recently started checking all of my email accounts with Shadango.com. Anybody else tried that yet? Shadango allows you to have advanced filtering applied to ALL of your existing accounts (both POP and IMAP). It's frickin' great. So now I don't get any more spam, plus I can check all 5 of my email accounts from one place. They've also got file storage, a calendar, etc. It's money. Check it out.
-Nate
Much harder than it seems. A spam trap address can take months or even years to get up to the same levels of spam as other addresses.
Some techniques;
Unsubscribe the address.
Apart from proving that some spammers actually do harvest from unsubscribes, this method isn't very effective, because some spammers actually do remove you from their lists.
(of course, if you only unsubscribe addresses that don't get any spam, it can't get worse.)
Dictionary attacks. If you run a mail server, you will occasionally be attacked. Either pick easy to guess names, or accept any name that fits a rule. It's a good idea to always reject the first name (unless it's already in your lists) since some spammers start with a 'test' name.
Also, there will be plenty of names tried, so there's no need to accept a suspiciously high percentage. Choose a simple rule that rejects a fair percentage of the names.
For example, accept any name which has a '5b' as the last hex character when hashed.
If your server has any extra delays after a bad name, remove them.
Buy expired domains.
Some of my best trap addresses are from previously owned domains.
Posting to usenet.
I've not had much luck with this.
Posting to mailing lists.
This also seems fairly hit or miss.
Posting to websites.
Works eventually, but it can take a long time.
Setting them in Ineternet Explorer.
Some web sites have javascript that can grab your email address from your browser.
(bonus points if you write this up in a proposal)
When you get spam...
Read the web pages. Once you actually get spam, either read it in a browser, or download all the links with wget. Some spammers are paying attention, in particular it seems, the ones who sell addresses to other spammers.
Respond. When you get one of those weird messages like "Are you the same noc-staff I went to school with?" Respond with a simple "sorry, wrong guy."
-- this is not a