Anti-Spam tactics in profiles?

or is my box is owned by Brett?

[dingman]

Forgive me if this has been there forever and I only just noticed it, but every few times I look at a member profile with an e-mail address in it I get an address at my personal machine. '[e-mail]' seems popular, as does '[e-mail]'.

Is this a new feature? It was a bit disconcerting to see my host name show up in someone's alleged e-mail address, but I suppose that's the point. *I* know that they aren't using my machine as a mail host, but a harvester doesn't necessarily?

[jdMorgan]

dingman,

Yeah, it's a spam trap. If you used a 'bot to harvest the addresses, and then sent UCE to them, you'd eventually send spam to your system admin - in most cases, that would be your ISP.

Jim

[dingman]

The one thing that seems odd to me about it is that I was surfing from andrew.dingman.org - it's my personal workstation. So if I were harvesting e-mails to spam, I'd end up spamming myself, not my ISP. (As if Ameritech would notice. Fsking incompetents, but they have a monopoly on broadband where I am.)

Presumably dial-up names are at least frequently mx'ed to the responsible ISP, but I assume spidering would be the sort of thing that uses enough bandwidth that you wouldn't do it over a dialup connection. How does the spam end up going to an admin rather than the machine that was used for address harvesting? Not that making the spammer spam themselves is inherently odious or anything. But I like making their admin see it even better.

[Brett_Tabke]

There's a couple other tricks I work in there that I won't discuss. It has gotten several full blown spammers booted off their isp and one isp put on a block list.

Since I put in that system this summer, email harvestors have all but gone away. We used to get 5 to 10 a day and now we get 5 to 10 a month. Whats better, is once they look at some of the emails and realize it's laced with dozens of "mickies" and antispam addresses, they don't use the list.

Thanks to members for realizing what we are trying to do there and working around it when it pops up.