Web Poison
Web-based email harvesters suck. I hate spam and anything I can do to poison the well for them I will. I got tired of seeing "Email Siphon" in my logs, so I created a little gift for the spammers.
Imagine this...
If the agent of the extractor client is still set to the default for the product in question, it forces them into particular directory. If not, there should be two concealed links at the top and bottom of your pages that point to that same directory to catch link harvesters regardless of agent or top-down or bottom-up processing. In that directory will be one file called index.html that is actually a perl script that generates a couple of hundred bogus but syntactically valid email addresses and 4 links to other seemingly valid "mailing list" pages. These links all work no matter how named, but there is only one file in the directory. Apache's Mod_Rewrite is a really effective tool. :)
Here is how you set it up:
- FILE: htaccess.1.txt
These are the rewrite rules you need to place in the .htaccess file in the web root of your domain. This will redirect any access from these agents into the directory specified. I call mine /lists/ but I suggest you name yours differently so the companies can't block directories. It must point to the directory you have created for your trap directory. - FILE: htaccess.2.txt
These rules allow you to execute an 'html' file as a script and force any file name ending with 'html' to actually load index.html. This will have to be added to the .htaccess file in the trap directory. Be sure to change /lists/ to whatever you called your trap directory. - FILE: index.txt
Save and rename this file to 'index.html' and put it in the trap directory. Run 'chmod +x index.html' to mark it as an executable and it should work. Point your browser to the directory and insure the script amd links work. If you feel like being especially helpful, change the format of the page around to match your site so there are fewer traits to filter against.