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Spam fighting ideas, anyone?
Metafilter has a post on a PHP routine that generates 20 or so random "e-mail addresses" for a site, so they can be hoovered up by spambots and theoretically screw up somebody's spam run. First read through, I thought, "Good idea! I'll do the same thing in ASP, and that'll show 'em, by golly." But since spammers often pirate legit e-mail addresses for their "from" lines, I don't suppose it would really do that much to the spammers, only to the sap whose address was nicked. (My Hotmail address has spammed at least three times since I got it, five or six years ago, judging from flurries of bounces I've gotten. On another occasion, my ISP cut me off because my server had spewed forth thousands of e-mails hawking Herbal Viagra without telling me...) And since they sell millions of addresses at a time to each other, I don't suppose twenty bounces from Rantburg's contribution would even be noticeable. At this point, I've simply set my Outlook to take all messages originating with Yahoo, Hotmail, MSN, AOL, Earthlink, Lycos, and a few others, and dump them into my junk mail folder, to be sorted through at liesure, if any. That reduces the junk I see in my inbox to manageable proportions, and the real people at Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. â I think there are nine of them, by my count â can be handled by the exceptions function. If anyone has any better ideas for dealing with this stuff, I'd sure like to hear them... Posted by: Fred Pruitt 2002-08-26 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=6539 |