Its Me wrote:
Other than that, another Idea I got (may work, may not) is to make all kind
of bogus numbers@noshuc domain.. ie (e-mail address removed) and put
them all up on a website and wait for a spider to attempt to snag the bogus
emails, and flood a spider with bad addresses to make it not worth spamming
(but make sure you have real bogus, and not wanted to register domainnames).
Might be an option. But perhapse more friustration talks than anything.
I had the same idea one night and decided to write a program that will
create 1000's of invalid email addies just to put it on the web for them
to come across. So I took a trip to the world of spammers to look at it
from their point of view. Here's what I found while researching it-
A majority of email addresses are culled from NGs. This includes munged
addresses (
[email protected]). Yes, they have software will use
'fuzzy logic' to remove certain popular strings. The software they use
scours the net/NGs looking for anything vaguely resembling an address
(anything with (e-mail address removed)- and links to other sites that potentially
have addresses on them (sign my guestbook links are popular)
Of the addresses they collect, they can (and do) check them for validity
on 3 levels depending on the spam software they use.
Level 1 checking- Correct syntax (IAW RFC 2821/2822) This means making
sure that addresses don't contain illegal chars. (although, my research
has taught me that technically, the rules for invalid characters is a
grey area) (see RFC 2821 section 4.1.2 for more info).
Level 2 checking- DNS lookup of the domain (it will check to see if the
chars after @ and before .com is a valid domain name.
Level 3 checking- Connecting to the SMTP server of the domain in the
potential email address and trying to send empty message to the
"person". Depending on the SMTP server, it may or may not send back a
message saying whether or not they have a user by that name. (Yahoo for
example won't reply if it a valid address or not- it is up to the
spammer to decide whether or not to include these). I am guessing this
is why so many have invalid reply addresses because if they choose to
include the domains that don't reply, they risk getting thousands of
bounced email addresses. Since it's perfectly normal to intiate a
contact with an SMTP server, and send that request (because that is how
email is sent), they are still breaking no laws.
It's important to note that all 3 levels can be done without ever
sending an actual email to anyone and more importantly 1000's of email
addresses can be verified in a minimal amount of time.
Yeah, I feel your pain and frustration. Posting 1000's of invalid email
addresses will only trap the spiders without the proper tools to verify
the addresses. However, I digress. Here is what I am thinking.
Every second the spend trying to verify a bogus address is one less
minute in their day to spam people. It eats up processor time. The
problem lies in getting lots of people to post lots of addresses.
Furthermore, spammers are conintually searching for fresh addresses, so
simply uploading a page to your webspace will only work for a short
time. For it to work, you will need keep posting fresh invalid
addresses to keep tying them up.
In a perfect world, SMTP servers would simply stop responding to 'user
exists' querries, and ISPs could do more than sue a spammer. Yeah, yeah
I know that in the US a spammer can face a fine of $25,000 a day and a
trip to Federal 'pound-me-in-the-ass' prison, but AFAIK no spammers have
seen the slammer. To compound the problem, some ISPs actually profit
from spammers and remain untouchable because they inevitably claim they
didn't one of their users were spamming (despite charging them for extra
bandwidth for months before closing an account!) Not to mention the
overseas spammers (Hong Kong, I'm looking at you)
I really don't know what the 'answer' is. Spammers have a slew of
underhanded methods of getting your email address and no shortage of
people who aren't privy to their sleazy methods enough to protect
themselves. The best you can do at this point is to use filters set on
"draconian", be very cautious about giving out your email address,
refuse to do business with spammers and companies that support spammers
(again this is a slippery slope to travel, because I have found out that
MANY so called reputable companies take part in spamming to some
degree). In other words, keep a low profile, try to stay off their
radar, and with any luck, in time, a solution can be found.
Sorry, this was so long, do you see my frustration?
