Do infinite loop anti-spam sites help...

or is this a spam itself?

[Jon_King]

I recently came across a site stating that a link to their page, which is filled with bogus email address and an infinite loop will help thwart email harvesters by jamming up their lists with gazillions of nowhere addresses.

Is there any truth here?

[Receptional Andy]

Opinion on this is rather split. There was some discussion a while ago here [webmasterworld.com]

[Dreamquick]

Is there any truth in what?

The fact that this will fill up their lists with junk?

Yes and no - spam traps aren't new and a half compentant spammer would prefilter their lists to avoid wasting time sending to example domains / reporting domains, if you use anything apart from these you run the risk that you might be contributing to the problem rather than helping.

Also bear in mind that it's not rocket science to figure out that (a) you're in a loop on a site (b) limit the number of pages crawled and (c) realise there are too many emails on this site (statistically speaking).

The fact that this will slow them down?

Not really - it all comes back to the advancing technology. Think about it - if your expensive piece of software consistently crashed during one specific job you'd report it to the developers as a bug, and they would hopefully fix it.

Spammer software will be the same way - find a bug, report it, it gets fixed. Any data which can lock or crash an application would be considered a bug.

Tarpit-type slow down can be easily counted by finding the "sweet-spot" for the request time-out, somewhere in between avoiding good pages and killing your through-put.

BTW if you really want to be spammers at the address harvesting game do it the old fashioned way - slap them with a 403!

- Tony