New member looking for spam

[gkd_uk]

Hi

I have noticed a new member who has used his email address as his username: [[.h.thorby@hotmail.co.uk.]] (Used brackets so spam bots don't pick up the email address)

Is this guy looking for lots of spam email? Spammers will easily pick his/her email address up

Thanks

[temi]

Quite surprised you could register with your email address.

[gkd_uk]

I have noticed quite a few members posting their email addresses. This is what spam bots want.

Found this on the net which I found quite interesting.

Spam Bots

What is a spambot?
A Spambot is a piece of software, a program that someone has written. Which language it was written in does not matter, but most are probably written in C for speed and portability reasons. A spambot should not be confused with regular robots, also known as spiders or web-crawlers.

A spambot starts out on a web page. It scans the page for two things: hyperlinks and email addresses. It stores the email addresses to use as targets for spam, and follows each hyperlink to a new page, starting the process all over. Spambots also usually do not follow the guidelines in the robots.txt file, like civilized robots are supposed to. Most spambots are a part of a larger program, allowing them to send out the spam to email addresses as it find them. Others merely store the email addresses for later use.

Spambots vary in their intelligence and sophistication, but even the smartest can be fairly easily fooled by the tricks on this site. The simplest spambot would simply find mailto links, and follow each hyperlink as it comes up, until it reaches a dead end. The smartest ones can recognize email addresses in many forms, recognize dead links, avoid certain types of email addresses (such as *.edu and *.gov) and track many pages at once.

Sourced from Turnstep

[midlandi]

Great post gkd

Thanks for sharing that i found it very informative.

[gkd_uk]

Thanks Midlandi

[rakib]

very useful discussion. every members should read it.