Spammer Tracker
Spammer tracker is a program which generates unique email addresses (eg
'ga-gl@blah.forkqueue.com') and
tracks the IP address they were given to. This enables one to know 'who'
harvested the particular address, in addition to seeding spammer's email lists
with useless addresses.
In order to work it requires the following:
- Your own domain name with a catchall account (can be a subdomain, eg.
'blah.forkqueue.com').
- A web server with MySQL and PHP 4.
Download
Spammer Tracker 0.1
This software is licensed under the terms of the
GNU
General Public License
FAQ
Please note that despite the heading, these question aren't actually frequently
asked. As I write this I haven't even released the software yet, so no-one has
actually asked any questions yet, frequently or otherwise. I hope you will
forgive me this small white-lie.
- I have a domain that has only a few accounts on, can I still use this?
Yes - simply insert entries into the 'emails' table and the addresses will be
marked as used, for example:
mysql> INSERT INTO emails (email, ip) VALUES ('john@example.com',
'Reserved');
How does it help to know the IP address that harvested this email
address?
Eventually one could potentially block http(s) connections from those
harvesting email addresses, thus making their harvesting lives more difficult.
Personally, I find it quite interesting to find exactly who it is doing the
harvesting, although obviously others will have different values of
'interesting'.
Should I have a robots.txt so that search engines won't index the
page?
You can do. I initially considered this but there are two major drawbacks.
Firstly we want the page to be found by as many harvesting bots as possible,
and search engines are a potential way they might find out about your page.
Secondly, it would be interesting to know if spammers are finding addresses via
the Google cache - if they are they it will be evident as the email address
used will be that given to a Google IP address.
Don't email me here: ga-gl@blah.forkqueue.com.