Hi all,
It used to be easy to get a decent spamtrap account going, and using your SMTP server's logs to find invalid accounts was a reasonable place to start looking for addresses that had by accident already become seeded but that were otherwise unused. But nowadays, spammers stop distributing unsubscribe links that you can use to seed when you do finally lure something in, and Usenet only ever attracts Chinese/Korean garbage.
I'm trying to build a new spamtrap to collect the hard stuff to feed into the classifiers and report to SpamCop, but I've had very minimal luck so far. The only sure way seems to be to publish the address somewhere, but it has evidently to be somewhere popular, or else it'll never be found. So, my own web pages, which are only there to redirect visitors away from my webmail server, lists one of my traps and is, by the evidence of what that trap receives, not very popular. :-)
Can anybody advise on a non-intrusive, polite way to begin dropping bait where spammers are likely to find it? It may seem a stupid question, but I'm no fan of many web applications (I don't often participate in chat rooms [how do spammers get you there?], Forums, guestbooks, etc) and can't think of a single way to begin without also being as abusive as the spammers. The most effective methods of simply providing alternative email addresses on pages where spammers would let you do that to unsubscribe previous spam, on the basis that whatever it is, and whatever it affiliates to must be spam, are basically unused now because spammers really don't care if their lists are valid or not or how hot they are if they are. Likewise all the entries in the SMTP server log showing attempted deliveries are all previously-used accounts like the one that automatically mailed my PGP public key that got to archives, but they can't be used because they were formerly used and there's no guarantee that the input would be spam, although it's likely they would be.
So, I'd really appreciate any ideas!
Cheers,
Sabahattin