Re: Interesting spamming tool: a robot to grab e-mail addresses

[Richard Kettlewell <]

Simon Wilkinson writes:
>>> Bull's Eye Gold is the PREMIER email address collection tool.
[...]
> 
> Here's an idea (presuming it ignores robots.txt files, and forges its
> User-Agent to look like a popular browser) Use wpoison (or similar) to
> construct an infinitely deep area of your web tree. List this area in
> your robots.txt file.
> 
> If you see more than (x) hits to this area in a certain time from a
> certain IP address then set up access control measures to block that
> IP address from accessing your server. Perhaps return a message
> telling them why this is happened, and how to have their access
> re-enabled. You could do all of this automatically, so the admin
> wouldn't have to do anything about it.

If the scanner was run by a user of an ISP which allocated addresses
dynamically then you'd end up blocking people who had done you no
harm.  Which would be bad.

Better to pollute address lists with long lists of undeliverable
addresses, IMHO.

ttfn/rjk