Spampoison

I'm not quite sure of what it is.

[Marino]

Hello,

For some time now has been launched "spampoison". I'm not quite sure it's not in fact a fake spam prevention system done by spammers to get a higher pagerank or something...

It's said to be designed to protect blogs from emails harvesters, but due to the increasing number of totally fake blogs community -search out your logs and you'll find "some"- I guess that both are related.

Any clues about it?

[guitaristinus]

I think it is just another idea someone has to make money. Don't see how sites linking to it would get less spam. Maybe they will get a bunch of people who don't know better linking to it. Things people would do for a buck. Seems harmless, though.

I take it they spammed your logs?

[mblair]

It seems to be a little clever -- the links you use to link to it go off to a page that randomly generates a bogus list of email addresses using known spammers own domains.

So, when the email harvester visits it well traverse the link and scoop up a bunch of junk, adding a bunch of trash to their databases.

One problem I see is that alot of these email addresses are for domains that are inherently naughty -- perhaps Google may throw a penalty for this kind of link as it may seem to be a link to porn.

[guitaristinus]

That's true. We don't want to link to "bad neighborhoods."

[dcrombie]

You might be interested in something called "project honey pot" as an alternative ;)

[Marino]

Thank you all.

I've "met" Spampoison" as I was following some links about a fake blog community. You may have seen it: generally, some big blog with recipes and tons of links to the same kind of blog. All had the Spampoison icon. That starled me.

The honeypot project seems more serious.