Honey Pot Helps Break the Spammer Supply Chain
By Jim Kinkade
Recently Unspam Inc., the firm that developed
the Honey Pot Project, brought a lawsuit against
email address harvesters. For the first time,
the people collecting and selling email addresses
to spam vendors are feeling the sting of legal
action.
Project Honey Pot is a very sophisticated trap
for companies harvesting email addresses off the
Internet and selling them to spammers. Members
join the project by posting a web page on their
site that contains a unique address, hidden to
people but visible to the ubiquitous spiders that
crawl websites. Along with the address is a huge
contract that the spider agrees to, stating the
spider owner won't use the information to send
spam or sell to spammers. As soon as the Honey
Pot address receives an unsolicited message, the
spammer is caught.
The addition of the agreement is key to winning
lawsuits against the harvesters, since the use
and sale of that email address is a clear violation
of the terms for using that email address.
The Honey Pot website (http://www.ProjectHoneyPot.org)
has an extensive honeycomb of useful information
for servers fighting spam. It tracks the dates
and IP addresses of those harvesting emails addresses,
and the length of time it takes for the address
to receive the first spam email. The longest time
between the harvesting of an address and spamming
it so far is over two years; and the fastest time,
of course, is one second, with the average time
between harvesting and spamming running about
two weeks.
One of the most useful tools on this site is
a place to check IP addresses. After verifying
whether an IP is a harvester or spammer, blocking
the IP is possible. This is also a great tool
for email marketing service providers who want
to verify whether potential clients are conducting
business above board and collecting confirmed
opt-in addresses.
Companies who buy harvested email addresses
then send spam can also be tracked. There are
many more spammers than harvesters according to
the website. Once the harvesters and spammers
are inextricably linked, the legal weight of the
federal CAN-SPAM law is brought to bear.
Hopefully, with this legal pressure, one leg
of the spam triangle can be reduced or eliminated.
The authorities can control the contraband itself
-- harvested email addresses -- rather than sailing
after elusive pirates.
One issue with Project Honey Pot is that it
is run by Unspam, the company with the reputation
for pushing states to adopt heavy anti-spam laws
that directly support their business. They have
successfully helped create laws in Michigan and
Utah that set up traps of email addresses from
minors using their anti-spam technology. The laws
don't exclude other technologies, but so far only
their company offers the type of services specified
in the law.
I am not opposed to laws protecting children
from predators on the Internet or via email, but
to push a law that directly influences only one
company that generates profits from it seems a
little suspect. So far however, Project Honey
Pot seems like an effective way to identify where
harvesters and spammers unite, and attempts to
break that link in the spam chain. -- Arial Software
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