How Do You Fool Spam Bots?

ThisIsAnExampleAccou asks: "I am currently researching Spam Bots, and the various methods by which they collect addresses. While doing my research, I have started to notice the various ways that people post their email addresses to fool spam filters (i.e. [e-mail] - go fishing to mail me) What clever ways have you seen/done to fool spambots while still letting people know how to get in contact with you?"

I have a million addresses....

[crstophr]

You just need your own domain... where you can recieve email for any address at that domain.

Every time I give out an email address to someone new I give them a unique email address. Every time I put my email into a web form for some company they get it in the following format:

[e-mail]

friends can get silly things like:
[e-mail] or whatever.....

other examples:
[e-mail]
[e-mail]
[e-mail]

Then, if I begin recieving spam on one of the addresses I know exactly who it is coming from or who at least is responsible for giving out my email address. I can also go in and specifically turn off the offending email address, or better yet have each mail recieved fire off a "custom" error message or some script I have setup.

I've been using this method for a year and believe it or not I don't recieve more than 1 spam mail a week and never recieve it more than once on any given address. What is wonderful is that I have no fear or worry about giving out email addresses any more.

--Chris

Good ol' jpeg

[Unsolicited Commando]

I use a good ol' jpeg file. Has never ever let me down. Not even once. Also, I've got a spider trap [astrobastards.net] on my website [astrobastards.net].

Re:I have a million addresses....

[skinfitz]

This is a technique I described at DNSCON [dnscon.org] last year.

I go one further though - once you start to get spam to an address that you registered with a specific company (say [e-mail] for example) then reroute all mail to that address to the relevant abuse reporting addresses.

The result? By spamming you they automatically report themselves while you never see the spam.

Block spammers via DNS

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have your own domain you can do this:

I set up 1000 mx records like mail0001.mydomain.com, mail0002... etc. Then I setup my mail program with [e-mail]. Every time I sent mail to someone I would increment the number by one. Whenever one of those addresses got spammed I would delete the MX record. And I would know which asshole spammed me.

The nice thing about blocking spam via DNS is that the spammers never connect to your SMTP server, which saves a lot of bandwidth.