This would be even more incredibly cool if you could track which hosts were fed which fake addresses so you could see which hosts were really doing the spam crawling. For example: When a host like crawler.spammer.com goes to the wpoison page, feed it a unique email address@yourdomain. Of course this would require that you tie the wpoison script up to your mailer. Re: polluting the legitimate search engines as well as the bad: webcrawler.com keeps an (almost) up-to-date list of good webcrawlers (as well as some bad ones). (http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/robots.html) This list is only 3 or 4 months out of date, so search engines like Microsoft's yukon would probably not be in the list. You could use this to exclude which engines get the wpoison page or not. Of course this gets back to the topic of "whitelisting" the internet because of the spammers. Oh well, I'll shut up now :-)

---------- From: Jon Stevens[SMTP:jon@clearink.com] Sent: Thursday, October 30, 1997 9:58 PM To: Jay R. Ashworth; nanog@merit.edu; Brian L. Brush Subject: Re: Spammer web harvesting tool countermeasures

"Jay R. Ashworth" <jra@scfn.thpl.lib.fl.us> said the following at 10/30/97 5:33 PM:

...

This is really neat; I first found it on MacInTouch:

http://www.e-scrub.com/wpoison/

BTW, the WebStar version is at:

<http://www.clearink.com/fun_stuff/plugins/>

I just added a cool feature that makes it possible to easily add the spammers to the top of the page...or even better...add a "special" unique email address such as wpoison-spam@yourdomain.com. Then you can filter

all the email that comes through that address and add that to your spam databases. ;-)

fun fun fun...

-jon

Jon (no h) S. Stevens Web Engineer j@clearink.com Clear Ink and The Internet Weather Report <http://www.clearink.com/> | <http://www.internetweather.com/>