gHacks technology news » email spam

Trap Spammers with Project Honey Pot

Melanie — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 11:30:54 +0000

Junk mail is always a pain to deal with. Some junk mail may be stuff you actually sign up for and lost interest in. Spam, however, is stuff that you never signed up for and is often sent to you after some bot saw your email address on some site. Nobody like spam. The guy that had the bot harvest your email address probably even hates getting spam. Spam is actually illegal and there are actually people out there who track spammers and try to make sure they see their day in court.

Project Honey Pot is a system designed with those who receive spam in mind. What this system basically does is sit on a site and watch for email harvesters. When it finds an email harvester, the honey pot logs information about the harvester into the Project Honey Pot system. This information is then built up into various sets of statistics that are used in court to prosecute spammers. One of the things that makes Project Honey Pot cool is that it shows all this data on their website for the world to see. This allows those curious about their own IPs to check and see if they are considered a spammer. It also offers information on various IPs and statistics such as the average amount of emails sent to the honey pot.

Website owners can do one of three things to help Project Honey Pot catch spammers. A honey pot can be added to any website which will watch for and log any suspicious data on that site. This is for those who have a web host and are willing to install the honey pot script onto their site. Those who don’t have their website hosted or don’t want to install a honey pot can install a QuickLink. When a bot visits a site, they likely visit other sites that the original site is linked to in order to find as many email addresses as possible. A QuickLink is a hidden, secret link that only bots can see and visit. The QuickLink will take the bot to a site that does have a honey pot installed. Another thing that webmasters can do is donate an MX record to the project. What this does is give Project Honey Pot an email address to receive spam. Project Honey Pot will use this email address to see what kind of spam the harvesters are sending among many other statistics. This option is for webmasters who have their own domain name.

Project Honey Pot is a completely free service that survives on donations and tshirt sales through CafePress. They also offer various other services such as a directory where users can look up information about various IPs, including IPs that are known to belong to dictionary attackers.

Tags: Email, email spam, project honey pot, spam, spammers

Otherinbox Review And 25 Invites

Martin — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 22:17:42 +0000

The idea behind Otherinbox is to provide an easy to manage email service for marketing offers and all those community websites and networks. The service provides a web interface and an email address to every user who signs up for the service. The main selling point of Otherinbox is the automatic generation of mail filters and folders. The email provider is creating and managing filters automatically for the basic email address.

This requires some explanation. The user signs up and picks a username during the setup. The domain for his email is then created automatically using the formula @username.otherinbox.com. Every email alias that is put in front of the @ will automatically create a new filter and folder for that alias.

This effectively means unlimited email addresses for every user which are harder to guess than those from similar services such as Gmail or Yahoo Mail. This does however mean that every email will reach the inbox and that a new folder and filter will be created for them automatically.

Otherinbox can be used to send emails from the available or newly created aliases as well. The real question is if someone would really need Otherinbox. It is not a problem to create a new webmail account and create filters for marketing and networking websites. The only difference is that Otherinbox provides automatic filter generation while they have to be created manually using the other webmail services.

Is that enough to make the service worthwhile? That’s up for you decide. The Otherinbox team provided Ghacks readers with 25 email addresses. Just head over to http://beta.otherinbox.com/signup/ghacksnet and signup. The first 25 to signup get the beta account.

Tags: Email, email administration, email management, email provider, email spam, emails, otherinbox, webmail

Tinymail Email Protection

Martin — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 21:41:45 +0000

Do not publish your email on the Internet. That’s is one of the first lessons to learn when you start using the Internet. Once your email has been cached by a search engine it will sooner or later be discovered by bots that crawl the Internet for this valuable information.

All kinds of protection have been created to prevent this from happening. Some suggest using images instead of text, many obscure their emails in the hope that the bots will not be able to identify the right one and others are not publishing their mail at all.

Tinymail steps in and tries to be a barrier between your email address and the Internet. It does that by linking your email address to a Tinymail webpage which becomes your profile page. Instead of publishing your email on the web you embed the Tinymail code that is created after linking the email to a Tinymail email address.

The Tinymail code is showing part of the real email address and a link to the profile page which is only accessible if the user enters a captcha. If he does that he can take a look at the real email.

The idea itself is nice but it has two flaws in my opinion.The first is that it adds another step to the contact process. That might not be a problem if you desperately are trying to contact one but it is definitely a problem for other forms like providing feedback on a product. Users might give up in frustration and prefer to spend their time elsewhere.

The second is the captcha protection. Captchas have been broken in the past and once it is broken it could become a haven for a email collector who stored all those Tinymail emails in a database waiting for the right moment to decipher them all.

It would be nice if the email link could be deleted again after usage for a certain time, maybe even let it run out automatically after x days where x is a figure that the user can define in the options.

Tags: Email, email protection, email spam, email websites, mail, spam, tinymail

Five Free Akapost Plus Upgrades For Grabs

Martin — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:31:52 +0000

I covered the email provider Akapost about ten days ago and liked what it had to offer. It was not your usual Gmail / Yahoo Mail kind of provider but one that would put an end to email spam to your mail inbox. This was achieved by acting as a proxy between the user’s email account and the destinations.

The user would create an Akapost email account at their website and link it to one of his real email accounts. Whenever he wanted to signup on a site he would use the Akapost email account which would forward all incoming mails to his account.

Mails that he wanted to send could be send to Akapost first which would forward them to the email recipient. This effectively means that no sender or website is able to uncover the real email address of the user. Akapost featured a few additional options, just read my initial article if you are curious.

Free accounts can be created at Akapost which are good for one email link. I had a chat with the guys at Akapost and they told me that they would give me five free account upgrades to Akapost Plus which is good for 5 Akapost email addresses and 10 links.

The service usually costs $22.95 per year but five lucky Ghacks readers pay nothing to get it. You need to have an Akapost username. If you want to upgrade your account let me know in the comments. I pick five commenters in the coming days who will get the free upgrade. Regular commenters and visitors will be precedented.

Tags: akapost, Email, email provider, email proxy, email services, email spam, offers

Reduce Spam by using alternative Google Mail Address ?

Martin — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 07:59:31 +0000

I read about this tip yesterday at Digital Inspiration and when I woke up today I saw that Lifehacker wrote about it as well. The tip mainly stated that users who signed up for Gmail would not get one but two mail addresses: user@gmail.com and user@googlemail.com. The suggestion was to give on out to friends and use the other for all the other signups and conversations on the Internet.

It might seem like a solid trick unless you think about it for a second. If I know that there are two email addresses on those two Google domains that lead to the same user the spammer could know as well and most likely will. So, even though you use one email for private matters and the other for everything else Mr. Spammer will simply add a script that sends mails to both Google accounts automatically.

The only real way that works in my opinion are separate email accounts with no connection whatsoever. Using one account with those two email addresses is simply not reducing the amount of spam that you receive.

Tags: Email, email spam, gmail, Google, spam

Identify Legit Emails from major companies

Martin — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 10:22:54 +0000

Email spam is so common these days that it has become a part of our live to wade through the spam to identify the real emails that have been sent to our mail account. It can be a challenge for the average user sometimes while IT-professionals and experienced users identify legit and fake emails at a glance .

I bet you have asked yourself the question numerous times if an email was legit or fake. I know that I did and I analyzed the email to find out if the sender was really the person or company that it claimed to be.

The software Trend Micro eMail ID which I spotted over at Raymonds blog aids the user under certain circumstances. The eMail Id tool is a browser add-on for Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox that supports several webmailers like Yahoo Mail, Gmail and Hotmail.

Email ID scans incoming mails from supported companies displaying a status icon afterwards which tells the user if the email is legit or fake. Moving the mouse over the icon reveals additional information about the email received.

Trend Micro eMail ID is an easy to use security tool that does not require configuration at all. It does have some limitations though. First, it only works with Firefox and Internet Explorer and only several webmailers plus Microsoft Outlook Express 6.0 and second it supports only US companies at the moment.

If you are from Europe for instance you will not find this tool that useful because you normally do not receive that many emails from those companies from the United States.

Tags: email certificates, email spam, fake mail

Check if a website is revealing email addresses

Martin — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 20:46:43 +0000

You need to use the tools of the trade to check if your website is revealing emails from visitors or yourself. Most webmasters have a contact form somewhere on the page which is sometimes revealing the real email address of the webmaster. But even tricks like adding spaces to the email address, a REMOVEME part, writing (at) instead of @ and other means are recognizable by some email harvesters that do nothing else but to harvest websites and the websites that they link to for new email addresses.

One software that is able to crawl a single page, a website and even linked sites is 1st Email Address Spider. It costs $130 but everyone may freely test the software which has some restrictions in place. It is nevertheless sufficient for our cause. Once installed you simply enter the url of the website or page that you want to check, select if outgoing links should be checked as well and enter login information if needed.

The tool then connects to all webpages and links it can find and collects emails from those pages. It’s really interesting to see that websites advocating that you should conceal your email addresses are actually revealing lots of emails on theirs.

The best way to not give away your email address would be to not include it on any of your websites. Add a contact form instead that visitors can use to get in contact with you. If you have to publish an email address you should consider using an image, or more than one, to display it.

Some bots however are good enough to be able to process images as well.

Read More:

123 Email Address Spider

Tags: Email, email spam, webmaster, website

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Trap Spammers with Project Honey Pot

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