Yay, my Project Honey Pot honey pot caught an email harvester. Go me!
“WTF is Project Honey Pot?” I thought.
Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it.
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We collate, process, and share the data generated by your site with you. We also work with law enforcement authorities to track down and prosecute spammers. Harvesting email addresses from websites is illegal under several anti-spam laws, and the data resulting from Project Honey Pot is critical for finding those breaking the law.Additionally, we will periodically collate the email messages we receive and share the resulting corpus with anti-spam developers and researchers. The data participants in Project Honey Pot will help to build the next generation of anti-spam software.
Everyone hates spam and spammers, unless of course you are a spammer, and as someone who’s had their email address spoofed and then been spammed by my own email address, I particularly like this idea.
So, to all those spammers, I have this message, in the immortal words of Farmer Palmer…
Get orff moy laand!
I’m in, this is cool!
It is indeed very cool. I catch around one every six months which isn’t a lot but I get to feel like a bounty hunter for a few minutes.