jolttz's blog #!/usr/bin/perl

Annoyed of spam?

Most of us have complained about the spam landing on our inboxes. Spam is a huge problem for mailservers and actually for all of us but now let's have look back.
Have you ever set your e-mail visible on some forums or website you are registering to (in some cases it's even a default option)? Have you ever thought about unchecking the box that says, "Subscribe for weekly newsletter etc."? Have you ever posted your or your friends e-mail address on some forums, portal or even your own website?

These acts may sound very innocent but can actually be the main reason you get spam e-mails. There are 24/7 spiders/crawlers running around the web, searching for e-mails in the form of "you@mail.com" or more advanced crawlers even disguised e-mails like you[at]mail.com etc.
To pervent the crawlers adding your email to the "spam list" is to disguise it so it's easily understandable for human brain but can't be picked up by the crawlers. For example: you{at}mail{dot}com. Second solution would be adding an e-mail form so your e-mail won't be shown but people can still mail you. Also, if you have a company, stop having easily guessable e-mails like "info@yourcompany.com", instead use "information@yourcompany.com" or "cust-support@yourcompany.com" etc.

I wanted to know how easily the e-mails could be gathered so I wrote a small web crawler in Perl. It starts from some random page, gets all the e-mails on it and all the links refering to other pages/sites. Then it adds them to a MySQL database. After that it visits the links that are on the database next and does it all over again. It also filters the links that surely have no e-mails inside, like binary files (png, jpg, gif, exe, pdf etc.) and also pervents websites like google and yahoo that probably have no legit e-mails either. I ran it all night (about 10 hours). It went through 150000 websites and got over 5000 e-mails and I didn't even have to do anything. It's still far from advanced web crawlers but 5000+ e-mails shows how powerful it can be.

I'm not going to post the source here for your own good but if you e-mail me a really good reason, why I should give it to you, I might consider it .
If you knew all this, sorry for wasting your time but I hope I got someone thinking with this post.
tl;dr - gtfo.