Help fight SPAM bots
intro | addies | spamtricker
Intro
addies and spamtricker are two perl scripts that generate web pages full of fake email addresses. The idea is to thwart spammers who use Internet spiders to collect email addresses. When the spider, or robot, visits the page, it fills the spammer's database with non-working addresses, and (hopefully) helps put the evildoer out of business.
The two programs perform their task in different ways. addies is a CGI program and is the easiest to install. spamtricker generates static HTML pages, presumably at intervals set by a cron schedule. It is more effective than the CGI script, but requires more work and server permissions to install.
This is not an original idea on my part. I first saw similarly generated pages here and then here. I just wrote my own scripts as a "fun" programming exercise.
Jessica Hanmeier and
Janko Luin wrote a PHP version of my perl anti-SPAM
scripts. You can see it in
action and also view the
source. Feel free to link to their script or install it on
your own server - we're all together in the fight against
SPAM. Nice job guys!
More Info
These scripts are small and uncomplicated. My goal was to make them as easy to install as possible (especially addies). If you want a more full-featured anti-spam program, take a look at wpoison. It employs a number of tricks to maximize efficacy.
If you want to learn more about SPAM and how to fight it, check out these useful links:
- CAUCE - Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email
- Junkbusters - Bust the junk messages out of your life
- spam.abuse.net - Fight Spam on the Internet
- ScamBusters - Stop Spam!
- mailto Encoder - Formats your mailto: address so that SPAM bots can't understand it.