DTS Agent

Any new info on this UA?

[SmallTime]

A thread last June [webmasterworld.com...]
briefly discussed a user agent ending in DTS Agent.
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT; DigExt; DTS Agent" which appears from a variety of IP's. Searching the names I also came up with mention of Beijing Express Email Address Extractor v1.0, and something to do with SQL and data population. Curious that it only seems to mention NT. Anyone else seen more of this, or know what it is? I don't want to block any legitimate users, but do want to stop any email harvesters. Have a vague notion that it might be associated with the "surf for free" while we collect data outfits, but nothing definite.

[Dreamquick]

Two things you'll notice about that UA (aside from it being used by a known spambot which IMO makes it very unlikely to be anything useful);

1) Its malformed as it has no closing bracket - real applications with malformted UAs are *rare* as it appears unprofessional and people complain about it :)

2) One possible reason it always mentions NT is that the UA is fake and will be the same no matter which OS it is run on.

- Tony

[jdMorgan]

DQ,

I have it banned unconditionally, and have seen no ill effects. YMMV.

Jim