Slashdot Mirror
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?"
I ran an experiment to do just this... Originally USENET (a decade ago I did that one), web pages, etc... Hundreds of trap address' across many of the domains in my control -- harvest and block 'em early has been my general method... :)
I recently took 1 Windows 2K box (SP2) and put it directly online in the DMZ type zone. Do NOT patch it and add no virus software. Load some trap address' (never used before) into the Outlook address book.
It took twelve (12) minutes from plugging it in to getting many, many infections, to the final spam. Typical time is 3-4 hours usually and I've seen the test go for as long as 8 hours.
How many people do you know that use Outlook and may have your email in their address book? The bitch of the matter? No Windows here anywhere, well, except for VirtualPC which makes such tests so damn easy -- too bad Microsoft had to buy them up too...
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.
Register with every "reputable" company with a "privacy policy" you can find, and make purchases with them. Register a domain with the addy. Put the addy on tons of those little fill out cards that you have to mail in from magazines for free this, free that. Buy subscriptions to tons of Pr0n sites with the addy. Instead of usenet, post on several pay or exclusive product-support forums, where spam-runners can be assured of sure-fire hits. Damn! It's expensive to acquire SPAM!
I get spam from my domain registry, which has an email associated with it. I get the Nigerian stuff this way.
You want spam? You should have put in your email address into the submitted article...
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
We all know that the Spam won't show up if you want it. That's against the very nature of spam.
All annoying things always happen every time except for the one time you try and prove the phenomenon to a non-beliver. Well known fact.
Good luck at finding the spam (wow, I never thought I'd have say that.)
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.
Seems like there's more than a few people suggesting signing up with free porn sites to get spam.
Personal experience?
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!
If you deliberately bait spam, your research will only be about spam as it effects bait e-mail accounts. Your conclusions won't be applicable to normal e-mail use habits.
Want to survey spam as it effects a normal, real-life, daily-use e-mail address? Get a new address and starting using it as your primary account. Anything less will be irrelevant statistics.
Give it to some of your friends and relatives, soon you'll recieve 20 or so joke chain letters every day...
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
Write a HOWTO and put your real e-mail address in there.
;)
Worked for me
- 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.
New research shows spam no longer a problem!
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.
"Research Survey" = getting back at evil ex-girlfriend.
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...
Buy a throw-away domain name and post an index page with a email address. you could also use the method where you record the IP address of the spider by generating the email address on the fly. with [IP of spider]@domain.com and then set up a catch all email box. then you are monitoring the spiders ips and the mail servers ips. this idea was posted on /. a few months back but I couldnt find the link.
pretzel_logic
Hi, I'm pissed off at someone and would love to get them bombarded with spam. No, I don't think that'll work on slashdot. Better say "research" instead of "pissed off". Yeah, that should work.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
"My deadbeat roommate has pissed me off once too often. On a completely unrelated note, I'm looking for ways to attract lots of spam to an email address for... er... research. Yes, research sounds plausible."
spamthistohelpusout@someresearchcompany.com
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
If you deliberately bait spam, your research will only be about spam as it effects bait e-mail accounts. Your conclusions won't be applicable to normal e-mail use habits.
The relevance of a baited addres depends on how one does the baiting. I'd say that a handful of usenet posts, pasting it to a couple of web pages, use of it to create accounts on websites (e.g. here), etc would be very representative of common patterns of address disclosure.
Create Several Email Addresses - Be scientific ...
.....
Address 1 - (Control Address) Post No Where and read no messages until the testing time is over
Address 2 - Post On Usenet (Deja.com)
Address 3 - Post In Public ICQ program
Address 4 - Porn Sites
Address 5 - IRC
etc
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.
Is the account you want spammed provided by the same ISP as your personal account? It sounds like the ISP you are using for the research account might be doing a really good job killing off the spam before it ever gets to you. In order for the research to be uncorrupted you need to verify that your ISP passes all e-mails through to you, rather than spam filtering.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
That isn't any sort of encrypted text. It is simply a (pathetic) attempt of evading filters...
You insensitive clod!
You've ruined the poor boy's dream!
Just think of the hours of fun he could have had "cracking" the "code".
Just think of the elaborate code -- and equally elaborate conspiracy behind it -- he might have created in a desperate obsession to make his data fit his theory!
It could have been a new formularization to rival the Illuminati, Ancient Astronauts, secret codes in the Bible, or some other tortuous, contrived theory! Why, he might even have constructed the ultimate conspirarcy theory, a religion!
But no! You had to cruelly disillusion him. And rob us of the fruit(iness) of his labors.
For shame!
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
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
hmmmm... this must do something really interesting to the computer or disk to have a warning like that...
Next step would be to see if I could induce what the intent behind the restriction would be. If I couldn't reason it out, then I might be tempted to try to dupe the disc and put it in another computer (*Always* mount a scratch monkey.)
In fact, putting an admonition involving tech in front of a geek is like putting something bright and shinny in front of some people.
but on the other hand you just found a way to physically "tar pit" a geek for a better part of an hour....
______
Once: you're a philosopher. Twice: a pervert.
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