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One trick is having an tarpit email adress on your website. It is hidden using CSS so no real visitor sees it but it is visible in source. If your mail server recieves mail for that adress you can just block that IP for 24h.
One trick is having an tarpit email adress on your website. It is hidden using CSS so no real visitor sees it but it is visible in source. If your mail server recieves mail for that adress you can just block that IP for 24h.
This sounds like bad advice and would result in blocking google and other major ESPs. I occasionally get spam from people who took the time to create gmail accounts. Based on this advice, the honey pot email address would get spam from a Gmail account and your script would block Gmail servers.
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The OP put those addresses on that web page, and only on that web page. Some addresses received spam. Edit: that’s not to deny that big data leaks are a serious problem
I'm not denying that it happens. I'm saying that it not the classical way to spam people nowadays. It's obvious to any non native english speaker, when you have a spam in english, it is because they toke the email from the web. When it's in you native language, it's usually from a data breach. I'm vastly more spammed by the later. I can confirm it with unique email addresses of the "+" form (but not with the + charac…
But yeah, I’d say most junk mail is coming to (1) an address leaked from one Russian bank (!) I used, (2) the address listed in public business databases (I have a company in Estonia).
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Did it ever matter? My gmail address had been in the open for 22 years. I have more problems with people sharing the same first name and using my email for registrations than the spam.
I stopped being concerned about email harvesting years ago, I just simply leave the email on my website. Spam handling is okay enough, I guess. But I like this review of techniques, even the simplest ones are very effective, that surprised me.
I agree that email addresses get leaked eventually. However, LLMs are quite good at generating spam and I think soon will evade most filters.
I have a hypothesis email scrapers don't parse HTML at all. I suspect they search the raw bytestring for @ characters and take whatever's on either side of it. That probably gets them as many addresses as they can realistically use at a fraction of the cost, given how expensive HTML parsing can be. (Similarly, I'm sure most links can be found by searching the bytestring for "href" and taking what's to the right of it…
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> You have to build up your domain and IP reputation for a long time first. Or buy/rent domains/IPs that have good reputations, as there are services that specializes in just bringing up the reputation for stuff so they can sell it once "good". Same exists for user accounts for various platforms like reddit and so on.
Sure, you'd burn that reputation extremely fast as Google detects your sending patterns change and the first few users start reporting as spam.
Yes, that is indeed the point of those; "build up reputation -> sell/rent -> someone uses it to burn reputation -> rinse and repeat".
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I have a hypothesis email scrapers don't parse HTML at all. I suspect they search the raw bytestring for @ characters and take whatever's on either side of it. That probably gets them as many addresses as they can realistically use at a fraction of the cost, given how expensive HTML parsing can be. (Similarly, I'm sure most links can be found by searching the bytestring for "href" and taking what's to the right of it…
it really varies, you are correct most modern ones search the byte string for @ characters but there are probably hundreds of different methods out there in black hat marketing circles to scrape emails.
I stopped being concerned about email harvesting years ago, I just simply leave the email on my website. Spam handling is okay enough, I guess. But I like this review of techniques, even the simplest ones are very effective, that surprised me.
Perhaps my provider’s just great at filtering spam - but I kind of doubt it’s better than the major players (for years I’ve used Zoho for email - and it’s ‘okay’ enough that it’s not worth switching).