mad props!! Re: [olug] Fw: OLUG.PHPCONSULTING.COM

[Tim - DZ]

So what, who cares if only 20% of the harvested emails are accurate and
actively read?  So you change the program to also snag mangled emails
and the accuracy rate drops to 5%, still doesn't matter.  Set your
'followed link' (or depth or whatever you want to call it) count to
about 1000 and you'll end up with 100,000's of email address.  100,000 x
0.05 = 5000 or so 'good' addresses.  But since you have no way of
knowing which ones are good, just send email to all 100,000.  Find an
open smtp relay on a decent machine and this will take no time at all.

-t


-----Original Message-----
From: olug-bounces at olug.org [mailto:olug-bounces at olug.org] On Behalf Of
Christopher Cashell
Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2003 1:18 AM
To: Omaha Linux User Group
Subject: Re: mad props!! Re: [olug] Fw: OLUG.PHPCONSULTING.COM


At Mon, 29 Sep 03, Unidentified Flying Banana Brandon Lederer, said:
> I dont necessarily consider that "mangled".  If I were writing a 
> harvesting
> script it would look for the std name at domain.com
> 
> and name at domain dot com, switch at to @ and dot to ., stip 
> whitespace, and
> there ya go.... about 2 or 3 lines in perl.

Remember, though, that even e-mail harvesting spiders that just pulling
in the standard user at domain.com will pull in a *huge* number of false
positives.  You end up with tons of e-mail addresses that are no longer
valid, that are spam-proofed in some way, things that look like e-mail
addresses but aren't (user at host masks from irc logs, etc).

Trying to pull in 'mangled' e-mail addresses is going to increase your
number of dead or bad addresses enormously.  Remember too, that there
are dozens (if not hundreds) of minor variations that you can do to the
'user at host dot com' type of mangling, which can make programatically
converting them to usable e-mail addresses very complicated.

>From what I've seen of most spammers, they're not exactly people who 
>are
interested in anything that might resemble increased work or time, so I
doubt they'd bother with any complicated unmangling attempts. Especially
when there's no need to bother.  Processing web pages and newsgroups
will get you all the e-mail addresses you want as fast as you want them.

> however I do appreciate the effort.

I've only actually seen one e-mail harvesting program up close and in
use, and that one didn't even try to read mangled addresses.  I can't
say for sure that none of them do, but I'd be very surprised if many of
them bother with it.

-- 
| Christopher
+------------------------------------------------+
| A: No.                                         |
| Q: Should I include quotations after my reply? |
+------------------------------------------------+

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