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

[Gunnar Lindberg <]

In my personal opinion, adding a lot of fake, non-existant, addresses
to all web pages is a bad idea. If we ever get to the point where the
spammers cannot find an open relay, OK then we may have made it, but
as long as they do - and they fake their From - there will be some
fairly innocent relay/victim that will get hurt, rather then spammers.

What one could think of, though, is adding existing addresses that one
way or the other are extremely  s l o w  when you send to them, i.e.
it takes for ever for each spam batch to get out. That too will affect
the innocent relay, but not by "User unknown" bounces and in fact not
even by consuming a lot of mail resources.

Then, of course it could help if we could identify and block hosts
that do not honour the "don't search here" instructions, but un-
fortunately the damage is already done by the first one and after
that the addresses are on the Spam Distribution CD.

Btw, what's the legal status for these kind of searches? Could we get
at the spammers this way, or would we only shoot ourselves in the foot?
(I can imagine that Swedish law might consider a web page with email
addresses to be a data base that needs a permit).

	Gunnar Lindberg