The idea isn't new: A spambot's IP address can be found by "poisoning" it with information that can reveal its location, thus catching the address harvester with their hand in the cookie-jar! This is intended to be a better mousetrap.
Every page that's served can include() a script that generates an email address.
Unlike normal email addresses, this email address may reveal the date and time of the visitor:
Using the above example, if one was receiving mail for "example.com.xyz" then one could track down a spambot when the mail comes in (especially if that machine name is used only for catching spam).
In most current scripts that do this, there are two ways that the information is passed
to the bot. The first way, as shown above, is just a plain text address. This would be
trivially easy for a bot to filter out, thus keeping its whereabouts secret.
The other way that this type of poison is commonly dispensed is by generating an email address
that contains either a hash (of the visitor's information) or a serial number.
Here's an example using an md5 hash of the above address:
This script does not require a database of all visitors, nor does it use an email address
that can be easily detected (and filtered out) by a spambot. The data containing the visitor's information
is encoded into fairly small address.
Aside from producing a smaller address than base64 encoding,
this encoding method can survive being forced to all uppercase or all lowercase.
This also produces some surprisingly pronounceable addresses,
likely to trick any phonetic tests that a spam-bot might run against it:
The script can be included in each page on a server by doing this:
If (when!) mail comes to an address generated by this script, the script can be used to decode
the address. Just go to the script, and append a '?' (question mark) followed by the address:
It may also be useful to feed these messages directly into a spam-filter application to train as spam.
This project was inspired by | |||||||