Dark Matter

I have to agree with Big John.

You don't feed that fire with more gasoline but with ways to reduce the "fire".

SA is to fight Spam not have the owner of the account let the spambots own that fake email addy to your site. That nots helping the War on Spam; by doing that you are supporting spam instead.

SmartGuy

You have a horrible example.

First of all, what I am doing will reduce the "fire" in the long run. And I am not feeding the "fire" anything, but I am simply containing it to a certain area, or e-mail address for that matter.

Also, this is in no way supporting spam. First, it will take up system resources on their end (Sure, a trivial amount, but still.) They have one more e-mail address, that they will sell to other companies. These companies won't sell their products to me, because I will not check the e-mail address. Therefore I am HELPING in the war on spam more than I am hampering it.

Bigjohn,
What harm can exposing my domain name do? Like they can't get that anyway? Are you trying to say that spammers will scour through my site, looking for e-mail addresses? They can do that anyway, also. They can get all the domains they want from a simple whois. What would make them want to index my domain more than one of yours?

Dark Matter

Your fakeemail[at]yourdomain.com is to supporting Spam. They own your domain, they could careless that its whatever[at] so by you doing this you are supporting spam.

And no in the long run you are not solving this, this is a horrible example of how to solve this.

How to solve it is to
1. Having applications inplace
(MailScanner, SpamAssassin and SpamBayes)(Thunderbird).

2. Using Block/Black list
(Spamhuas)

3. Block known spambots
4. Banish visible email addresses
such as mailto
4.1. Use images
PBM package (which seems to be packaged with Linux) is a great way to generate these graphics, for example:

shell> echo user[at]example.com | pbmtext | pnmcrop | pnmpad -white -l2 -r2 -t2 -b2 > email.pnm
shell> convert email.pnm email.gif


This produces the following, which looks pretty neat and tidy:

user[at]example.com

5. JavaScript
to make your email links hard to recognise for spambots

There are more examples I have but not going to list them if your going to think that way.

SmartGuy

I still disagree. But I don't want this to go on forever, I want this to stay on-topic.

So let's just agree to disagree, and leave it at that.

Dark Matter

Maybe instead of your plan, you set up a Spambot Trap.

mobiuseek

Hi,

First I'd like to thank everyone for the great tutorial. I had set it up, and it was working for a bit. Now when I get my CRON email I just get:

Learning SPAM
Learning HAM
Done

This is similiar to DivinoAG, but my SPAM and HAM folders are the same CAPS as in the script. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Bigjohn

no, you are feeding it by subscribing. This subscription will end up in the hands of thousands of spam lists in a matter of hours. Kinda like painting yourself with honey and then laying down in the grass next to an ant hill.
Your logic is flawed. Spammers work on the law of averages. But RECEIVING the spam also uses resources. And now that you've exposed your domain name ACTIVELY to them, every possible dictionary name that could be associated with your domain will be hit with spam, bogging down SURPASS servers too as they process the bogus messages - even if they just bounce them.
WHOIS requires THEM to do it, and to know the domain... you can't "whois *" and get a list of all domains ever registered...

It's like this. My way: YOU have a candy in your pocket. An ant in the grass smells it. He has to climb up your leg and into your pocket to get it.

Your Way: you toss bits of that candy down onto the ground leaving a trail to your bed.

John

mobiuseek

Hey BigJohn,

Any ideas about my issue that I am having w/ the Spam learn script?
I posted right above your last post.
Thanks a ton for taking a look.

Bigjohn

Support may have to upgrade your SA db's. The servers are now running SA 3, and the older DB's sometimes got corrupted when they were first upgraded.