Spam Free Email

Okay, a pet peeve of mine (I have many) is email harvesters. These are spiders or really bots that go through web pages and collect email addresses and give them to the spammers and sometimes virus programs to send their nefarious messages out.

Not only do these bots take up the resources of the web server that could be much better used by serving pages to real people, but they also makes many webmasters almost not want to put their email address on their web pages for fear of getting 10 times more spam than before.

So I’m not sure exactly what you would want to do with the information, but I think I have found a way to track them.

So on random web pages you can place an email address, but you dynamically generate the page with the IP address of the visiting computer at the user name in the email address. so the email address might look like 10.1.1.1@somedomainnoonehas.com. Then if you ever get an email sent to that email address you know that it was collected by an email address harvesting bot.

If you wanted to get really fancy you could change the numbers to letters, like a is 1 and B is 2 and then assign the period to z so that the email address looks like random characters and nothing that the person running the harvester would recognize.

Also, you would want to put the email address in angle brackets so that it does not show up on the page for a real user.

I suppose that you could then block any and all access to your websites from the IP address, like 10.1.1.1 (Don’t block that one though) Then it could never harvest email addresses from your web server again … but it could have been a dynamically assigned IP address and a real user might be blocked instead.

In any case if I get some interest maybe I’ll create a domain to catch harvesters and publish a list of IP addresses that I see the email harvesters working on. Email me and tell me if you think this is a good idea.

This is a topic that I find amusing to say the least. I have two funny instances that I enjoy mentioning to people that are scary when you think about them too much.

First off is an easy word to say you don’t want going through your email system. That word is “crap”. Unfortunately we found that the word “scrap” was getting caught by the spam filter. On occasion this particular client of mine has scrap of things that they correspond with people about. So there went one word that was pretty good to filter.

The second word was “cialis” anyone want to play this word game with me? Add a three letters on the front and one on the back and you can easily get “specialist”. We found this one with a person who was sending email and on the signature line they identifies themselves as a “Whatever Specialist”, so now we have more messages about erectile dysfunction getting through our spam filters.

The moral of this little story is to test your spam filters and make sure they are not catching words that you may truly want getting through your email system. Make sure you know exactly how your spam filters work, and don’t get caught by changes in upgrades to your anti spam software, like we did with both of these examples.

Some days I feel like spam filters are the most pointless task in the world. The process of looking through all of the spam messages to identify the parts that will filter messages from coming through again is not only time consuming, but mind numbing as well.

I have a client that is using the NEMX anti spam software it’s working exactly as designed, but that is it’s strength as well as it’s weakness.

It filters exactly what we tell it to. So when the spammers change an “I” for a pipe “|” in a word it missed that message. So we end up having multiple rules for the same word. I am aware of the fact that NEMX has a regular expression engine that would allow us to generalize these, but that leads into the next problem, which is filters that go awry.