Thoughts on spam control

Patrick Lynch plynch at ind.net
Fri Oct 31 19:46:47 UTC 1997



I saw an interesting link suggested in this group for the spam problem:
  
http://www.e-scrub.com/wpoison/

>From there I saw this program.  
http://www.e-scrub.com/cgi-bin/deadbolt.cgi/show_demo_entry


  These are both interesting programs, but may have inherent problems.

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 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?

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.

-- 
Patrick  Lynch -- INDnet Network Engineer 
E-mail -- plynch at ind.net, noc at ind.net
Phone: 317.263.8966	 FAX: 317.263.8831



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