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Anti-Spam by Saturation

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One way that spammers harvest addresses is to send a robot program out, continually visiting web sites, while storing all of the email addresses it finds. The spammer can assume that a fair percentage of email addresses found this way are legitimateaddresses still in use. What if we saturated the spamming community with millions or billions of fake, random email addresses? That could possibly cause their harvesting/processing/storage/mailing of so many fake addresses to no longer be profitable. I could write web code in just minutes to generate a page containing countless fake, random email addresses. And this single page could generate another horde of fake, random addresses each time the page is refreshed or visited. The technique wouldbe most effective if implemented by everyone out there that hates spam, so that there are billions or more dummy addresses clogging spam servers. I don't know how effective this approach would be, but who would have ever thought that a silly little Word macro virus could bring down half of the Internet's email servers in a single day? If you are reading this on a web site and want to contact me, go to http://ganns.com and find my subtly-listed email address on the left.

5 replies

by ~webadmin

I see your line of thinking but, Why eat up further bandwidth with this spam? I dont think it would effect most of this stuff anyway.

by generalist

This would work as a start I suspect.

And if you mixed things up by hiding the values in variables, you could even make it harder to find the e-mail addresses.

Imagine looking for 'mailto:' when it is stored in three variables that are then shuffled back and forth using string functions. Obscure code, with the variables renamed to protect against pattern checking, would be a good robot killer.

by tomsal

Too bad we don't know the physical address of where these spammers are headquartered.

Then we could just drop some Daisy Cutters on them. ;)

by generalist

That might work well if we could set up a spammer's convention, perhaps on a salt flat near, but not at, Las Vegas.

I fear, unfortunately, that the spammers are like terrorists and blend in with their victims.

Hmmm. Could spamming be considered a terrorist activity?

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