Honeypot for e-mail harvesters

Catching the bad guys red handed

[Oaf357]

Very interesting article here:
[kungfugrippe.com...]

I'm sure WebmasterWorld has most of them covered already but you could use this for a great many things.

[jeremy goodrich]

Thanks for posting the link - I'm sure (don't have a thread handy, though) that we have covered a few other methods here in the past regarding foiling email harvesting bots.

It is an ongoing issue, though, which I find annoying at best. For example, I had for a short period of time, one email addy posted online, and now, it gets a slowly, but increasing, amount of pure SPAM.

One slick company even emailed and said, "respond, else you will be added to the mailing list" which I just deleted. I'm hoping it wasn't them that started to mail me after that, but you never know.

I guess because it is so cheap, relatively speaking, that these people continue to dilute the industry for the professional email marketers?

Over time, I think more & more webmasters will implement security fixes like the above mentioned one, or similar, to thwart email harvesting bots.

[peewhy]

I set up a pop3 account and placed the email address in one or two sites. The results are frightening.

The other aspect is the 'unsubscribe' facility, do it and they might unsubscribe you from their list .... but sell it on. They are highwaymen and you cannot win. Yet?