Wednesday, November 24, 2004

Catching Spammers in the Act of Harvesting Emails

Project Honeypot is a clever development from Unspam, which sets up honeypot accounts (fictional e-mail accounts to draw in spam e-mail) on anyone's website in a tricky way; they are generated as to both look like reasonable addresses and to tie them to the IP address of a visitor. That is, the John.Smith@unspam.org address was only given out Nov. 1 at 4:10 PM to IP 12.0.0.2. Brilliant! The result is quite slick as you can see in the sample page. The e-mail is only visible to humans in the page source. Sending any commercial mail to harvested addresses, including these honeypots, is illegal under CAN-SPAM.

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