Waxy.org
Waxy.org is the sandbox of Andy Baio, a writer and tech entrepreneur in Portland, OR. I work with Expert Labs, helped build Kickstarter, founded Upcoming, made an album, and other stuff too.

Contact Me: Email, AOL IM, or follow me on Twitter.

Spambots and Dynamic E-mail Addresses

Posted Apr 16, 2002

Phil just came up with a clever variation of Andre's spambot-defeating e-mail trick. On his old site, Andre dynamically displayed the current date as his contact e-mail address (a la 04162002@example.com), and wrote a procmail script to weed out e-mails sent to addresses older than a week.

Instead, use SSI and environment variables to include the client's IP address in the e-mail address. So, <!--#echo var="REMOTE_ADDR" -->@example.com becomes 38.107.179.212@example.com. Now that you have the spambot's IP address, do something creative with it.

8 Comments (Add Yours)

Apr 19, 2002
8:45 PM  
Phil wrote:

I think what I'd do is use a procmail script that does a dns lookup on the IP in question, and forwards a copy of the spam to root, abuse, webmaster, and postmaster @ both the ip address in question and the host/isp/etc determined during the lookup. I imagine most would be ignored, but if the generated email was well worded, maybe 1 in 100 would nab someone and get their account suspended/removed, and that would be good enough for me :)


Apr 19, 2002
11:13 PM  
Andy Baio wrote:

Yeah, but how would you know which incoming e-mails were spam and which were from unsuspecting people who thought you had a bizarre e-mail address?


Apr 22, 2002
8:15 AM  
Phil wrote:

well, if integrated w/ spam assassin, the emails would be passed to the script only if they pass the spam assassin test.


Apr 22, 2002
9:31 AM  
Andy Baio wrote:

So if Spam Assassin flags it as spam, add the IP address in the e-mail address to the ban list. Neat.


May 2, 2002
3:20 PM  
Ben wrote:

This might be of interest, if you've not seen it already: Address Munging.


Oct 21, 2002
1:08 PM  
bk wrote:

Hahaha, did you just pull that IP out of the air? It's mine! lol. I was here looking for the backlinks script and got sidetracked... :P


May 8, 2003
1:28 AM  
J i m s t e r wrote:

string1="my.address"
string2="@mydomain.com"
myemail=string1+string2

Implemented in your fave language. Just as long as the complete string is never quoted in full on the page, then the trawlers never get it.

Whaddevva.


Aug 14, 2003
11:03 AM  
BEN GRANT wrote:

I really want to know I could get use the spambots. It is interesting to know how it works. Just educative.


 
Waxy Links
Ads via The Deck
May 15, 2012
Ignore Hitler — Draw Something spawns a meme; I like the meta one (via)
Austin Seraphin on learning echolocation — he's a real-life Daredevil
Mat Honan's feature on Yahoo's mismanagement of Flickr — a depressing read, especially while seeing the team release great new features
May 14, 2012
Make interviews Bunnie Huang on the end of Chumby — sad end to a promising product, I received one of the prototypes at Foo Camp in 2006
Rebecca Sugar's Singles — file under: scenarios I'd like to play in a videogame
SMBC on hell — sounds about right
GameBoy Color emulator in JS — the source is on Github (via)
60,000 Dominoes — 65 hours over eight days; the blooper reel was hypnotic (via)
OAuth Is Your Future — Dan Hon snaps some screenshots from the near future
May 13, 2012
Fracuum — winner of Ludum Dare 23; every winner is worth playing
May 11, 2012
Welcome to Life — "the Singularity, ruined by lawyers" (via)
BusinessWeek on the post-Kickstarter life of Diaspora — the founders talk about the Ilya's tragic suicide for the first time
Anachronism detection in Mad Men episodes — language studies from the person who did the frequency analysis for Downtown Abbey (via)
Verge feature on Scamworld, the inside look at Internet scams — incredibly deep investigation and short film, brilliantly made (via)
Hartverdrahtet — amazing 4k intro from the PC demoscene (via)
Mike Birbiglia's short film from This American Life — starring Fresh Air's Terry Gross
Chris Poole's talk on the shifting meme landscape at ROFLCon — the shift away from interest-based web communities towards social networks
Robot butt that represents emotions — I'm hoping someone turns this into a drone
May 10, 2012
Gina Trapani on the failings of "brogrammer" culture — holy hell, the comments are awful
Dustin Curtis on pixel fitting rasterized vector images — best explanation of a long-standing issue I've seen
Mitt Romney bullied gay students in high school — people change, just so long as he takes ownership of his actions; oh, wait
Walt Disney's Taxi Driver — the scene starting at 3:45 is like a parallel universe remake of Roger Rabbit (via)
Ben Jackson on memes, the Internet, and the divine — "The memes we choose to elevate to Internet fame are the product of the purest form of democracy ever invented"
May 9, 2012
Recursive Drawing — watch the video or it won't make any sense
The Forger — for fans of Kutiman's ThruYOU, found footage beat mashups from Meat Beat Manifesto's Jack Dangers
May 8, 2012
Steve Albini AMA on Reddit — "There won't ever be a mass-market record industry again, and that's fine with me"
Maurice Sendak, rest in peace — goodnight, Max
May 7, 2012
Tinkercad — amazing WebGL CAD designer that prints to Makerbot, Shapeways, and Ponoko
Mechanizing a miniature Main Street Electrical Parade — wonderful attention to detail; watch the finished parade (via)
LA Times on American Airlines' attempt to revoke its all-you-can-fly passes — the company regretted its short-sighted decision to offer lifetime first-class travel (via)

Andy Baio lives here. Some rights reserved, for your pleasure.