[Fwd: You're on Whozat!]

[Hugo van der Kooij]

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Anthony Cartmell wrote:
>> Google made it harder to search for email addresses to stop spammers
>> collect addresses. But it seems some other bozo's stepped in and started
>> to serve the spammers community.
> 
> Good news for people selling e-mail scanning services, I suppose.
> 
> The trouble with trying to keep e-mail addresses secret is that it's
> pretty-well impossible. You only need one contact to have an infection
> on their PC and your address is added to the spammers' lists. Once on a
> list, you're probably there forever.
> 
> As I'm a freelance web developer I want my e-mail address easily
> accessible to the world, and it is. Luckily MailScanner means I still
> see very little spam in my in-box :)

Keeping addresses a secret is not the best way to fight of spam. There
is no disgreement there. But there is a limit as far as one should help
spammers collect usefull lists of addresses. This party has crossed over
to the dark side in my view.

I am already part of some honeypot projects and am planning on starting
a simple project myself with the simple purpose of generating pseudo
random email addresses for my domain if people visit the wrong page (one
not visably linked).

Recording the client information of visitors and linking them to the
pseudo addresses will allow me to track how certain addresses were
obtained. And it will polute the spammers address lists even further.

In a similar fashion I use unique addresses for webforms and such. I
tend to slip in slight typo's so I can see how the address is being
(ab)used. That way I found out that Verisign is not trustworthy at all.
They sold my accounting details to others. These accounting details were
the only bit one could not obtain with a whois query. But they ended up
by magazine publishers. At least one magazine publisher using that
address told me they just sold the addresses for their advertising
campaign. So Verisign is flirting with the dark side. And this was
before they started hijacking the internet by redirecting non-existing
domains.

Hugo.

- --
hvdkooij at vanderkooij.org               http://hugo.vanderkooij.org/
PGP/GPG? Use: http://hugo.vanderkooij.org/0x58F19981.asc

	A: Yes.
	>Q: Are you sure?
	>>A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
	>>>Q: Why is top posting frowned upon?

Bored? Click on http://spamornot.org/ and rate those images.

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