OT-SPAM/Harvesting prevention

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Hi there,

Because this is both a mail issue and a DNS issue, I am sending it to
both the EIMS list and the QuickDNS list. My apologies if you recieve
duplicate posts...

I know there are several sites that deal with prevention of email
address harvesting, such as
<http://members.aol.com/emailfaq/mungfaq.html> and
<http://cgastudy.fateback.com/study/help/SPAM.htm> but I found out
about a method that I hadn't heard of before and wanted some feedback
from other admins out there...

The Model Shipbuilder FAQ on Usenet
<http://www.seaways.com/faq/smf-contrib.html> has the following
method to foul would be harvesters form collecting addresses:

Each email address in the contributors section has a mailto: link
that points to two addresses, that of the contributor and also
"noc@ftp.warez.org". The purpose of this is that this second address
is supposed to be some kind of loopback. Sending mail to it will in
theory bounce mail to the senders ISP. So every time a spammer uses a
harvested address, they also send a spam to their own ISP. If they
are a heavy spammer, they will in theory flood their own ISP who will
probably shut them down.

I'm skeptical of this working for several reasons:

1) if it really worked, more admins would use this trick. The Ship
Modeler FAQ is the only place I've seen it.
2) a savvy spammer could easily cull the 'trick' address from their
list since it is a single address.
3) I have doubts that a single email address could forward messages
to a spammer's own ISP. I wonder how such an address could work, and
if it could I suspect that it would only work if their ISP's email
address was noc@domain.com.

This last one is where I'm a little uncertain. I tried doing some
searches and found this thread about DNS records:

<http://ciac.llnl.gov/news/BIND/9801/msg00433.html>

Is there some validity to the plan outline above? I also found that
the domain is up for sale <ftp://ftp.warez.org/> so if there is some
validity, it probably won't last long. Maybe there is some way to
reimplement this elsewhere...

What are your thoughts on this and what do you think is the best
method for preventing harvesting on the web and on UseNet?

Thanks for your feedback!

--Eric Kopf
--
Administrator
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