SpamPoison: Weird, but Interesting!
OK, so spammers have “bots” that scan web sites for e-mail addresses and add them to their lists that they then sell to other spammers for high fees and them use these lists to send out tons of spam! “What if,” someone said, “What if… we provide the bots a link that will generate tons of useless e-mail addresses (on their OWN spamming domains) that will ‘pollute’ their lists, making them huge, unmanagable, and unusable?” Well, that is the idea behind “SpamPoison”… you set it up as a link on your web site, or blog, and enjoy the fact that spammers will be harvesting bogus addresses and causing them trouble. It does have a certain poetic symmetry doesn’t it?
Linking to spampoison is great, but when programming spambots it seems easy to
circumvent a domainname or IP address.
You may also include something like that in your own website(s), at your own IP address(es),
which makes it more difficult for spammers to circumvent.
PHP and perl scripts are available for download here: http://hugi.to/blog/archive/2003/07/29/spampoison
and here: http://www.monkeys.com/wpoison/