Spam (unsolicited commercial emails) is a real scourge. Today in 2008, more than 95% of all emails on the Internet are spam! If you want to protect yourself, encode your email addresses on your websites with the script below, so that the spammers can not recover them to spammer you. You will find here an encoder and email encryptor to protect you against this spam. HOW SPAMERS RECOVER OUR ADDRESSES EMAILS The first technique used by spammers to build lists of emails to spam is that of "email vacuums".These are software or scripts that scan the Internet, websites and pages of these sites, looking for signs like "mailto" or "@" (used in the source code of web pages to make an email a clickable link). When they detect these signs, they are programmed to retrieve the email address that goes with it and store it in a file. Tonight, I decided to see how it works, concretely, and especially to see if it's a difficult thing to do, or if it's within the reach of any spammer apprentice. And here I am fixed! Unfortunately, it is child's play to find the software that does this and use it. And I can not, after this little experience, invite you even more insistently to go to our Cryptemail page to learn how to encode your emails on your websites , and especially to do it really! Softwares It took me about 2 minutes in a search engine, and 2 minutes to download! There are all kinds.Sophisticated, simple, sometimes even some, after having a nice harvest of email, propose a party "emailing", which allows you directly to start your spamming! I will not give any specific information in this article. But these programs exist, and I think it's important for spam victims to be aware of the methods used by spammers, to see how easy it is to make email lists from our websites, to better to defend oneself. Scanner - Harvest - Spammer Here is a screenshot of one of the software I used (I obviously masked the name of this software, illegal in France, I recall, and that could be worth a nice trial to its creator, but also to its users, and then this article is not intended to learn to spam). As you can see, me who knows nothing about it, I managed to collect 119 email addresses in 5 minutes! Imagine if I had let it run for a whole night !! In the space of 5 minutes, the "robot" scanned more than 1022 web pages! It was enough for me to open the program, to enter a web address (URL) of departure (I took one of my sites) and to press "Start"! Then, the software starts to scan the pages of the starting site, and when it finishes, it continues with all the websites that are linked in this starting site. And so on, to infinity if we let it. And this software is also able to perform the same task on news servers! We can even, after collecting the emails, For info, with another robot, we managed to suck even more emails: 1573 addresses in 10 minutes. Conclusions I was really amazed at the simplicity and lack of knowledge needed to scan the web and build email lists. We understand better, after that, why spam is such a plague! And the first conclusion of this brief demonstration is: Encode your email addresses on your websites ! Know that there are software and scripts much more advanced than this one. For example, software that can scan (but in a different way) all emails of the same domain name! For example, we enter moos.fr, and the robot will attempt to connect to the SMTP server (domain mail server) by sending queries (like "pierre@moos.fr? Cuckoo? Y'a someone?") . He will test, according to what he has been asked, randomly, all combinations of letters and / or figures before moos.fr (aaa, aab, aba etc ...). For a request, if the answer is yes, hop, the email is stored in a file! Some servers are protected from this type of requests, but many are not (and not least, reliable source ...). Another more sluggish method is to use software generating email address, with the same principle as that described above, but then the spammer sends an almost empty email to each of these addresses. If it does not receive in return a message of "non delivery" (you know these emails that we receive when we were wrong email address for example), it means that the address is valid. Other methods There are many other ways for spammers to acquire email lists: The illegal purchase of more or less legal client files from companies that are not very ethical (open an account at Hotmail, do not use your email, do not disclose it, revisit your mailbox in 15 days and you will be surprised) The purchase of CD-ROMs of millions of emails collected with various techniques (I receive regular spams offering me the possibility of buying such lists) The delegation of this spam to specialized companies (and yes, it exists, and they are well established, and one of them, French, even has for motto "to you the benefits, to us the risks "... but what is justice doing ...!) Finally, they sometimes use random methods, called "dictionary attacks", with software that can create hundreds of thousands of random addresses on a particular domain. They test each email and those that do not come back to them (bounce), they know it's a valid address. There is even some software able to check the validity of emails, and keep only the good, before sending.
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