Nate Carlson <natecars at real-time.com> writes: > On 25 May 2002, David Dyer-Bennet wrote: > > I created a test for that a few years ago; http://www.dd-b.net/stpit/ > > is the top of it. All email sent to the addresses on exhibit there > > goes into a special folder (and is reported to spamtraps.taint.org). > > > > I believe I created it in October of 1999 (that's the earliest file > > date I can find in the directory). The first spam arrived in August > > of 2000. The most *recent* spam arrived in it December of 2001. > > Only 111 pieces of spam have *ever* arrived in it, including at least > > 6 test message I sent myself. > > > > My conclusion, so far, is that spammers do harvest the web for > > addresses, but only very rarely, and they don't seem to pass the > > addresses so harvested around. > > Do the search engines actually archive this page, though? > > I'd guess that the spambots start at the engines and go from there.. Really? Why would they do that? And what sort of query would a spambot use in a search engine to start off it's traversal? I don't see any value added in going through the intermediate layer -- rather the reverse, since a spambot would want *not* to respect robots.txt exclusions, for example. -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net / New TMDA anti-spam in test John Dyer-Bennet 1915-2002 Memorial Site http://john.dyer-bennet.net Book log: http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/Ouroboros/booknotes/ New Dragaera mailing list, see http://dragaera.info