List poisoning is a tactic for detecting or diverting e-mail spammers by tricking them into including invalid addresses into mailing lists. This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...

Goals

If a mailing list has been filled with many invalid e-mail addresses, the resources required to send a message to this list has increased. If one can poison a spammer's mailing list, one can force the spammer to exhaust more resources to send e-mail, in theory costing the spammer money and time.

Unfortunately, in more recent years, spammers have exerted control over virtually limitless computational and network resources, by using botnets and other stolen resources. Still, a different goal remains useful: Botnet is a jargon term for a collection of software robots, or bots, which run autonomously. ...

If spammers can be tricked into including the address of a honeypot or other trap into their mailing lists, then the source addresses through which they send spam can be detected. For instance, if the address user@example.com delivers to a honeypot system, then any IP address that sends mail to that system can be added to a DNSBL. Look up Honeypot in Wiktionary, the free dictionary For the plant, see king protea. ... An IP address (Internet Protocol address) is a unique number that devices use in order to identify and communicate with each other on a computer network utilizing the Internet Protocol standard (IP). ... A DNS-based Blackhole List (DNSBL, Real-time Blackhole List or RBL), is a means by which an Internet site may publish a list of IP addresses, in a format which can be easily queried by computer programs on the Internet. ...

Implementations

An example of list poisoining is Spampoison [1], a free system for webmasters and forum posters to fight email spammers. A link to a 'trap' is placed on a webpage. When a spammer's WWW robot (spider, bot, crawler) visits the page in search of email addresses, it follows the link to the 'trap' which is another webpage with a large number of dynamically generated fake email addresses. An example piece of HTML for a link 'poisoning' a spammer's list: <a href="http://english-64912943460.spampoison.com">Fight Spam! Click Here!</a> A webmaster (some women prefer webmistress) is a person responsible for designing, developing, marketing, or maintaining website(s). ... This article is about spam, the abuse of electronic communications media to send unsolicited bulk messages. ... Suborders Araneomorphae Mesothelae Mygalomorphae See the taxonomy section for families Spiders are predatory invertebrate animals that produce silk, and have two tagma, eight legs, no chewing mouth parts and no wings. ... Bot may refer to: Internet bot: a type of computer program Larval Bot Kill Bot Bot, Tarragona: a small municipality in the comarca (county) of Terra Alta, Tarragona province, Catalonia, Spain video game Bot, see Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, small, bloblike creatures that jump about and have no... A crawler is a tractor with tracks instead of wheels. ... An excerpt of HTML code with syntax highlighting In computing, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language designed for the creation of web pages with hypertext and other information to be displayed in a web browser. ...