An Evil Idea

I'm getting sick of comment spammers.

I've had the idea of whipping up a PERL script to throw up a page of spoof mailto links, all containing fake email addresses, but using domains taken from my MT-blacklist banned domains list (purged of ones like niu.edu and wikipedia.org). I'll put an invisible link to each page, make sure my robots.txt tells legitimate spiders to keep out, and wait for address-harvesting bots to slurp up the addresses.

I like the idea of using spammers to spam other spammers.

Posted by TimHall at October 16, 2005 07:31 PM | TrackBack

Comments

Except it won't work. At best - if spammers are using fake email addresses - the email spam you redirect will go nowhere.

If comment spammers start spoofing real email addresses, then you'll be directing a whole lot of spam at someone who has done nothing worse than put his email address on his blog.

Posted by: Paul on October 16, 2005 10:17 PM

You misunderstand me. I'm not going to use the fake email addresses, but the domains in the body of the posts. These aren't fakes, but the whole point of link spamming.

Still vulnerable to "Joe Jobs", though.

Posted by: Tim Hall on October 16, 2005 10:26 PM

Time for a whitelist mechanism to go with the blacklist perhaps?

Posted by: Michael on October 19, 2005 01:01 PM


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