A friend of mine recently suggested the idea of using a "mousetrap" email address for detecting spam. I've heard of this technique being used for tracking spam, but it had never occurred to me that I could use it to catch spammers.
Basically, the idea is to put an email address on a web page, either commented out, in an offscreen <div/> or in a text color the same as the background - the idea is to hide it from legitimate web browsers. The email address would theoretically attract spam robots and get added to all kinds of lists. Then, any incoming mail to that address could have its headers filtered and stored (or be auto-added to a razor-like database) as a guaranteed-spam indicator. Though this wouldn't be particularly useful to individual users (unless you're like me and have about 10 different addresses all on various spammer lists), it would be great help to sysadmins and domain owners who deal with many different addresses. If several different people started doing this, we could really get up a nice list of spammers for filtration. as long as those bogus email addresses weren't leaked to real people (then again, maybe auto-blacklisting could be plugged into SA so that a message would still require a certain score before it gets blacklisted).... I would love to write something like this (plugin?) for spamassassin, but from watching spamcop's email parser, I realize that I know very little about how to extract relevant information from email headers (since the IP addresses I see are completely different from the ones that spamcop says are valid) -Chris (sorry I was so active on the list and then stopped suddenly - I recently moved and am *still* waiting for my new line provider to get me some dsl hardware; even my isp is pissed at them now. anyway, I'm stuck using OE on a PC at work and it's not so good at filtering away my listserv messages) _______________________________________________________________ Don't miss the 2002 Sprint PCS Application Developer's Conference August 25-28 in Las Vegas -- http://devcon.sprintpcs.com/adp/index.cfm _______________________________________________ Spamassassin-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/spamassassin-talk
