by Flemming Funch
From BoingBoing:Merlin Mann outlines an ingenious procedure for identifying spammers' email-harvesters' IP addresses and user-agents:
"In each page I serve, I include a bogus email address, encoded with the date of access as well as the host IP address and embedded in a comment. [Apache's server-side includes are great!] This has allowed me to trace spam back to specific hosts and/or robots.
One of the first I caught with this technique was the robot with the user agent "Mozilla/4.0 efp@gmx.net", which always seems to come from argon.oxeo.com - it's identified it above as simply rude." Simple and clever. Well, relatively simple for a programmer. Now, if we could coordinate the gathering of a lot of that kind of data. I.e. mapping spam to who mined the address in the first place.
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