I Hate Spam

I found this info... somewhere. I can't remember where, but I saved it because I think we all need to fight spam. Most of our spam busting efforts are defensive, that is, they act to block or reject spam. This approach is an offensive one and attempts to stick it to the spam bots by foiling their attempts at harvesting addresses.

The idea here is to create a bogus file somewhere, preferably under a directory that is restricted in the "robots.txt" file to prevent the good bots from reading it. In this bogus file you include a bunch of fictional email address. They are fictional since they all contain invalid IP addresses.


SPAM bots eat me!
From: Yall@224.0.0.1 Reply-to: Yall@224.0.0.1
From: hello@224.0.1.125 Reply-to: hello@224.0.1.125
From: remote@224.0.12.1 Reply-to: remote@224.0.12.1
From: postmaster@127.0.0.1 Reply-to: postmaster@127.0.0.1
From: abuse@localhost Reply-to: abuse@localhost
From: root@127.0.0.1 Reply-to: root@127.0.0.1
From: abuse@127.0.0.1 Reply-to: abuse@127.0.0.1


The 224.x.x.x are reserved multicast addresses which can never be valid IP addresses. And 127.0.0.1 is the defined "localhost", used for loopback on a network interface which will point back to oneself if one uses it in an address. Admittedly, this method will only work with dumb spam bots, so their effectiveness is probably limited, but it's worth the effort.

This link puts the spam bots into a loop:

http://www.hostedscripts.com/scripts/antispam.html


Don't shoot the messenger-He may shoot back.

I guess the idea is to include this bogus information on as many of your web pages as possible. Even if it is hidden from view by visitors using standard browsers, the web-crawling spam bots will find and digest the misinformation.

I checked out the link above http://www.hostedscripts.com/scripts/antispam.html, and it sounds like a good spam-busting approach. It attempts to foil spambots by overloading them with random, false email addresses. I don't know how much it will help, but I'll put the link into all of my pages during the next revision.