From: Aron Roberts (aron@socrates.berkeley.edu)
Date: Tue Sep 17 2002 - 10:52:21 PDT
At 17:08 -0700 2002-09-16, Aron Roberts wrote:
> However, because of the multiple techniques spammers have at their
>disposal and their quickness to adapt to challenges, fighting spam
>may be ultimately more an issue of law, rather than technology, as
>the San Francisco Chronicle's Harry Norr has noted (below).
A correction to a typo: the author of several excellent articles on
spam in the San Francisco Chronicle is Henry (not Harry) Norr, the
Chronicle's tech savvy reporter and former MacWEEK editor.
I also noticed, only in hindsight, that both Kirk Franklin and I
saw and cited the article "How to spammers harvest email addresses?",
<http://www.private.org.il/harvest.html>. (Thanks, Kirk, for the
terrific links!)
An additional clarification: SpamVaccine, a convenient shareware
utility for obscuring e-mail addresses,
<http://www.matterform.com/index.php?page=/spamvaccine/how.html> is
available for Microsoft Windows, as well as for the Mac OS (both
Classic and OS X).
We're using this utility to obscure e-mail addresses on the
Micronet Web site, as you can see by viewing the HTML source on the
following page:
http://micronet.berkeley.edu/contacting.html
Finally, one of Kirk's citations is to Steven Champeon's August
2001 article in New Architect, "Save Your Site from Spambots:
Techniques to Prevent Address Scraping," which prominently features a
technique of using the 'mod_rewrite' module for the Apache Web server
to redirect e-mail harvesting tools used by spammers to an innocuous
"No spammers" page on your site. This relies on the odd fact that
many such tools proudly advertise themselves under their real names
when visiting your Web site, rather than pretending to be legitimate
browsers.
For those who may wish to explore this approach, the following
article might also prove useful as a starting point in identifying
user agent names associated with spammers' tools for harvesting
e-mail addresses:
"Protect Your Webserver From Spam Harvesters"
http://www.sendfakemail.com/fakemail/antispam.html
Aron Roberts
Workstation Software Support Group
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