How do you deal with spam harvesters?

Pieter · Post by **Pieter** » Jan 09, 2007 7:45 pm

Hi Chris,

Just plain curious, I have noticed over the past two or three weeks a couple of new user register who just smell of having joined for no other reason than to be able to harvest e-mail addresses to populate spam e-mail lists. One of the things, for me at least, as a dead give-away is the website they list in their profile, IF they give one.

How do you deal with those people, do you arbitrarily remove them of they look fishy or????

For the very reason of trying to outwit harvesters I hide my e-mail address in my profile, and on my website I populate my e-mail address by means of a little j a v a script which makes harvesting much more difficult. Even with that I still get more than my share of spam that makes it past my ISP's spam filter.

Post by **Chris_W** » Jan 09, 2007 9:31 pm

Hi Pieter,

Yes, I weed those users out as they come up. But they don't have to sign up to see the public email addresses so I doubt any of them are specifically doing that. If they post spam or send spam via the private messages they get deleted and their IP gets locked out.

It doesn't take a real person to round up email addresses on the internet and I doubt many live people are actually doing that. Most of them are done by computer programs, just like search engines, that crawl the web and pick out every email address they can find.

One other way email addresses are definitely harvested is with those dang chain letter emails (send this to 10 of your friends...). My mother loves to send those out with all of the addresses still showing in the headers

The best way to prevent any spam from here is to do exactly what you mention - hide your email address in your profile. That's good advice for everyone.

Pieter · Post by **Pieter** » Jan 14, 2007 12:29 pm

Hey Chris,

See you've been doing some pruning again: the newest member shows as having joined in July '06! Or am I witnessing something else? At the bottom of the forum index it shows who is online and this morning it shows nanny_56 as the newest member, yet when you check the memberlist there are an additional 100 members who joined since her. What gives, a scripting quirk..... just curious....

Thanks.

Post by **Chris_W** » Jan 14, 2007 12:55 pm

Hi,

I just had to set up her account again and used the latest number available, that's all.

Squash Blossom · Post by **Squash Blossom** » Jun 02, 2007 11:35 am

I've almost made a game out of it but "weeding" spammers at PugVillage is an everyday necessity...and 99.9% of them hail from somewhere called Eniwetok, Kwajalein.

I've been trying to read a little bit online about dealing with spammers and ran across one webmaster's comments yesterday that could be funny if they weren't sadly so true. He said the only successful way he knew to deal with spammers was to close his website.

Ann