How spammers get email addresses from web sites

There are many companies that use computers with specialized software (robots), that constantly visit the web, gathering information. Google and Yahoo, for instance do this, and also use info from others that do too. They do this honestly, and help make our use of the web easier.

There are others that use their robots strictly to search for this code; <a href = "mailto:your email@address">Link</a> in the web pages. That is how an email link is written in HTML, the language used to create web pages.

When such a link is found, the software extracts the your email@address part and adds it to a database. this database of email addresses is then sold to spammers. This process is called "data mining". When a spammer gets a message that an email is not valid, the address is dropped. If they get a swarm of these messages they get bogged down, just like we do, with spam.

There are some some instructions to robots that can be placed in the HTML code that tell robots not to follow links on a page like our "yeoman's" pages on this website. Some robot software is instructed to ignore these instructions, and go there anyway. That is why the email addresses on these pages have AT instead of @ in them.

I did some research about "email address mining" by the these modern day crooks. They are, now, getting few valid addresses from this site. They are getting a flurry of bogus addresses to gum up their works.

Thanks to there are hidden links in the web site that when "followed" by their "robots" lead to an endless loop of links, all producing phony email addresses. Yet, honest search engines ignore them. The end result is their robots get spammed with error messages, and they soon start ignoring web sites that use "W Poison".

You can actually see what the robot sees by clicking on a hidden link. On this page or the home page, move your mouse pointer to the very lower left hand corner of the page. Slowly move the pointer around in the corner, when you see the pointer change, that is a hidden link (one of several throughout the site), go ahead and click on it. When the page comes up, it is divided into two parts with nonsensical, but formatted text. The top part has phony email addresses, the bottom part has more links that lead to more pages like this one. These pages don't exist, but, are generated on the fly, so there is no limit to them, and each of their content is different, so the robots don't know they are being duped.

Cool, Huh?
Uffie

NOTE: I would advise you not to click on any of the links at the bottom half of the page, if you don't want to see anymore of these pages. Otherwise, feel free, they are harmless.

If you wish to know more about this topic, and how to protect your site click on the W Poison logo above.