Stop Spam Harvesters add a Honey Pot to your site

[fieldsfan336 0]

I just signed up, it's a fabulous idea!

[Trekkie101 0]

Can you explain how it works, Im still confused after reading there site, its not too clear, also explain if I have to do anything. Ive registered but need to know more and its site seems confusing.

[NilsC 0]

They create a php page for you that you add to your website. It's not visible to humans and it have warnings in cleartex in case a user uses page source to get to the page, that is where all the legalese is that makes it legal

On this page there is a email address that changes everytime a spider / bot collects it. The IP and other data are recorded in a database and if the email is used there will be a record of where and when it was collected. Since it's illegal to collect email addresses in a lot of places you can use

<meta name="no-email-collection" value="[link to your terms]" />

the no collect meta tag and link to your TOS, place it on all your webpages that way good bot's stay away from the pages.

A php script is created for you and you just have to upload it onto the server and place links to it on your webpages. Instructions come with it.

The honeypot does the rest, you will have email addresses that are automaticly updated and tracked by the projects servers.

Here is a link to the example honeypot http://www.projecthoneypot.org/honey_pot_example.php

Nils

[lesmizzie 0]

A way to stop spam are identifying the top spam harvesters, and shut them down before they reach your mailbox. The time you get spam at a new email address can vary. If you never give out the address on the Internet and the address are not just a first or a last name you may not see spam for years. If you create a website and put your email address anywhere on the page, eventually it will be harvested by a spam bot.

 

Munging the address may help, same if you use ASCII characters that will prevent harvesting for a while.

 

A lot of the block lists used by email providers come from users reporting spam and email hitting spam traps. Project Honey Pot are going one step further by identifying the spam harvesters and bot / spiders they use to crawl over your web-space using your bandwidth stealing your email addresses.

 

This is achieved by handing out a unique email address to every hit on your spam-trap. If a bot follows the link to the honey pot and harvests the address it will be logged. When an email hits that particular email box a spam harvester are identified.

 

Itâs a few different ways we can help stop the harvesters and help reduce spam. You can host a honey pot on your website or if that is impossible (like it is for me at the present time) you can put a link to the Project Honey Pots website and help educate others. The last way to help is donating MX addresses to the project. The more MX addresses they have the more variety of spam-traps can be created.  If you have a domain name that you are not using donate up to 5 MX records for each domain name.

 

To learn more about the project go to .        Stop Spam Harvesters, Join Project Honey Pot

 

Iâm using the button on company web pages and will add a honey pot as soon as an â.aspâ script are ready. I have an average of 5000 to 10000 spam per day hitting a email server with less than 200 users. The 50 to 250 that slip through the filters and spam assassin I report.

 

Nils

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

To those confused, I think this is what the system does:

 

There are programs that go to random websites and pick out email addresses.

 

The honeybot code apparently gets the address of the company that is trying to snag email addresses in order to spam unsuspecting people.

 

The honeybot reports these addresses in order to stop the companies from doing this.

 

I hate spam. I get at least twenty spam messages every few hours, and it is very annoying and it slows down production.

 

I think that this is an ingenious way to fight spam!

[mckenneth 0]

hhmp.. great idea... once I've got my domain set up... I'll sign up to this program!

[Sarah81 0]

Oh, how I love it when I hear about new ways to deal with spammers and their insipid little bots!I hate spam. Yahoo! does a pretty good job of keeping it out of my inbox, but I still resent the fact that the spam even exists - and I DOUBLY resent the fact that it's such a huge, massive deal now. (Some people get THOUSANDS of junk mails every DAY.)One of the best things that I've found to do is 1. don't fall for that stupid "click here to remove from mailing list" link ... and 2. cheer loudly when national news headlines are made because a bunch of idiots at UT-Austin were caught participating in one heck of a huge spamming organizations.

[vizskywalker 0]

Already a memebr and a proud donater of an MX entry. Already had one bot caught one with that MX entry. As soon as my website goes public it will have a honeypot page. For business websites, this is better than a ToS or Privacy Statement for convincing viewers that their email addresses are safe with you and you won't spam them. If you are stopping spammers, it almost guarantees you aren't one .~Viz