SpamPoisoner

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A type of PhonyFlood. But a good one. Rather than blocking or incapacitating e-mail harvesting spiders, "poison" the address databases of spammers with invalid addresses. This type of SpiderTrap addresses only the e-mail address harvesting problem. [Sugarplum] is such a SpiderTrap, as is [Spam Trap] by EarleMartin.

A simpler idea, [this] is just a page of fake email addresses. The spiders that hoover up email addresses for spammers (to send you details of how to enlarge your assets financial and physical) find this, and add a ton of junk to their database.

"poison" address databases of spammers with invalid addresses.

How do you know which addresses are invalid? If you use valid addresses their owner won't be amused. It's better to use addresses of domains owned by yourself, or where you have the permission of the domain owner.

: So why not use domains which have spammed the wiki to generate the false addresses?

: Spoofing is a problem since innocent apparent originators would become targets.

: Well-designed spam-poisoners will not use addresses at registered domains. They can use unregistered domain names (perhaps random alphanumeric strings, since using combinations of real words might cause future spam problems if the domain were registered), or syntactically invalid domain names (*@foo_bar.com), or domains with invalid TLDs (*@*.invalid.tld). There is no need to use real domain names, since most spam harvesting bots are poorly designed and don't perform even basic checks.

CategorySpam

SpamPoisoner

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