Journalism Research and Random Meanderings

Friday, January 07, 2005

Sometimes the Simplest Ideas are the Best 

A free anti-spam tool that's easy to use

"Anti spam fights spam bots

The purpose of this page is to make it so spammers who attempt to collect email addresses off the web, via programs, will not have real email addresses in their database. Anti-Spam causes problems because they will have to clean out their list. It also makes their database worthless for reselling purposes because the company purchasing their spam database will have worthless email address.

How ANTI-SPAM works:

This page has fifty randomly generated email addresses (refresh and new ones will appear). At the bottom of the page is a link to this page again, essentially reloading it for programs to collect more fake email addresses. Email collecting programs (spam bots) will be sent into an infinite loop by following the link at the bottom of the page and will get more and more fake email addresses stuck in their databases.

Spam is the electronic world's biggest problem. A fool proof method of filtering out spam does not yet exist, but we don't have to sit back and take it. Anti-Spam pages like this one make spamming less profitable and is our way to help FIGHT SPAM."