Webmaster Strategies For Fighting Spam
Fighting spam seems to be a never-ending battle. Like most illegitimate activities, it is going to take a lot to end it. There are simple steps you as a user can do to help avoid it, but webmasters and email providers can also do their part to help.
Spammers are able to harvest email addresses from forums, blogs, and other activities you do online. Their spambots take very little time and effort to obtain all these email addresses that they can then use to spam email accounts or sell to others. They exert very little effort to be able to do this while most of us spend quite a bit of time either deleting spam or trying to figure out how to stop it. If the cost of spammer’s job was raised, it might help put the ball in your court, rather than theirs.Some end-user techniques were previously discussed in Part I, and some of those can even be used by webmasters on whose sites your email address resides. Here are a couple of examples for webmasters:
- Spambots may seem invincible, but they can do only what they are programmed to do. If you can disguise your email address, the spambot may very well overlook your address and save you time. Simply changing your return email to include some underscores may be enough fool the spambots. However, it may also be something that fools your friends and if they simply reply to an email from you with a fudged address such as the one listed above, it will be returned to them. You can also embed your email in a graphic rather than using the mailto: or other text options. Most bots are not sophisticated enough to be able to read a graphic image then translate the pixel pattern. But, it will still be somewhat of an inconvenience to you as friends and colleagues still won’t be able to copy and paste your email address or use the “Reply to” option. You can eliminate visible and accessible email addresses altogether. You can offer a feedback form to store user information in areas that cannot be reached by most spambots.
- Hiding or making email addresses invisible makes communication between you and your trusted parties difficult. You can however block known spambots, thus putting the burden back on the spammers. Many times they have a signature that is easily spotted, with a known IP address or process name. IP blocking as well as blocking unwanted processes are fairly easy matters for webmasters. All they need to do is start a cron job that scans for a particular process name then terminates the associated process ID. Webmasters who are a little more savvy can have a daemon that is dormant until a process name is instantiated. At that point, the daemon goes to work, killing the process before it can harvest email addresses.
- There are spambot traps that block any incoming requests that contain excessive search behavior. This is a little more difficult to implement and administer, as you would need to define patterns, which would need to be altered for different spambots. There are sample perl scripts and how to guides available on the Internet and they can be found just by searching.
Even legislation doesn’t seem to deter the spammers very much. However, the most determined spammer will get tired of trying to harvest email addresses if it becomes too difficult. If you can make their efforts cost much more that their rewards, you are beginning to win the battle.
There are things in the works to eliminate or at least reduce junk mail - junk filters become more and more sophisticated and the penalties for sending spam are growing. Hopefully in time, technology will be able to outdo the spammers and reduce junk mail for all of us.