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Tracking Harvesters/Spammers

E-mail address harvester crawlers to be going extinct

Author: S.Byrne (5 Nov 14 3:02am)

As an experiment to see how quickly a published e-mail address attracts spam, I created an e-mail account on a domain I own and placed it on the homepage two blogs I own in July, one of which does not use the http:BL service. I added code to the CSS file to hide the visibility of e-mail addresses, as most bots ignore CSS files.

In the past four months, that e-mail address has only received a single spam message in September, which was a typical SEO scam.

So it is interesting to see that they practically abandoned this type of e-mail harvesting. On the other hand, it could be that the harvesters are only after certain e-mail domains such as Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc. addresses that are unlikely to be honey pots.

One method of e-mail harvesting that still seems to be ongoing is whois records. When I originally registered my domains, I did not expect my hosting provider to automatically use my account's e-mail address in the whois record and sure enough it started getting drug spam within a week.

Re: E-mail address harvester crawlers to be going extinct

Author: S.Byrne (17 Nov 14 2:23pm)

Just a quick update that my honey pot e-mail has finally been picked up by harvester, in this case one involved in malicious e-mails like phishing and booby-trapped file downloads.