Ok as we do not have an actual 'spam' forum I guess this forum's description is closest as we are talking about software designed to be intrusive by invading your email inbox.

Now we are all aware of email harvesting bots which are commonly used by spammers to build up databases of emails which can then be targeted for spam.

In an attempt to combat this spiders/bots some people have been creating bot trap scripts which basicaly have the same main function

  • Bot arrives at site
  • If spam bot ignores robots.txt file and begins scaning site
  • If 'good' bot (such as google bot) reads robots.txt file and avoids bot trap
  • Spam bot follows hidden link to bot trap
  • Bot trap script generates list of fake email addresses for spam bot to harvest
  • Script generates link back to self (with different filename) causing bot to get stuck in a loop


so the bot stays there harvesting fake email addresses and therefore in theory ruining the spammers database

now there is 2 problems I see with this

1. As the spammers will prolly be using zombie machines (or something similar) to send out the pam and will also be using a fake reply address they are not going ot be worried about emails failing. So is this actaully being counter-productive as the spammer will be sending out additional traffic which in reality will be going nowhere

2. Could the spammer not very quickly check the emails harvested to ensure that the domains actually exsist and simply scrap those which dont. eg if the script generated a random email of akldha@dhqwe8.co.uk the spammer could check the domain, see it doesn't exsist and then know the email is a fake

so whats your views on this? bot traps - effective weapon in fight against spam? or a nice diea that will never work?

v_Ln