Thoughts on spam control

Sat Nov 1 03:42:56 UTC 1997

On Fri, 31 Oct 1997, Patrick Lynch wrote:

> wpoison:  Traps e-mail web crawlers, but what is to stop it from trapping
>           other web crawlers that altavista, webcrawler, excite, yahoo and
>           other people use?

It uses an anti-robot meta tag:
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">
so the idea is genuine, well written robots will stop after hitting it
once, but the address harvestors hopefully have no concept of the above
tag and keep hitting.

I downloaded it last night and really like the idea.

>           It boasts that it can provide an almost infinite number of bogus
>           e-mail addresses as well as hyperlinks.  (these hyperlinks point
>           directly back to the same page)  Why would you want to trap a web
>           crawler on your site, using your bandwidth and resources almost
>           indefinitely?

I thought about this almost immediately.  First thing I did was hack in
a delay.  If they're going to get caught in an infinite loop of bogus
addresses, I don't want them "benchmarking" my web server by pounding on
it.  I also added in a further wrinkle to make the URL's it gives you look
a lot more different, so it doesn't appear to be just sending you right
back to the same site and script.  Have a look at
http://fdt.net/cgi-bin/wpoison
Note...for real use, it's probably a good idea to not call it wpoison,
lest the collectors clue in and ignore URLs with wpoison in them.  I have
a number of hard links to it, so it can be called by other names...now
that I think about it, it might be nice to shuffle those as well.

> Deadbolt(tm):  This filters out known e-mail spammers, from an automatically
>                update-able lists, provided by E-scrub Technologies.  What
>                happens when a majority of ISPs are using a filter like this and a
>                legitimate e-mail address is accidently put in the list?
>                That e-mail address would then be denied by a majority of the
>                ISPs.

I looked at this several months ago.  It seemed slow and klunky and a bit
more complicated than the average user could handle.  I like the idea
though.

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