Like you, we here at TH Media hate SPAM with a passion. There is now another way to fight back: This is a free program. It was released to the public domain for the sole purpose of fighting spam. Copy and circulate the included code to as many webmasters as you want.

Program purpose:

Spam Buster generates a totally random page which feeds bogus email addresses to spiders that collect email addresses from web sites. This page consists of:

- a META exclusion tag for well behaved robots and spiders
- a random (funny!) headline of 3-5 random words
- 2-6 random sentences of 2-12 words each. Each sentence contains one random (bogus) email address.
- Another 2-6 random sentences with no links at all.
- Another 2-6 random sentences of 2-12 words each. Each of these contains one random hyperlink. All links point back to this program.

How does it work?

Once in a while unsolicited "spiders" (aka robots or crawlers) will travel your web site and follow all links on all pages. If a page contains an email address, the spiders add it to their database, thereby making this user part of a huge email address collection. These collections will then be sold and/or used for sending unsolicited spam emails.

This is where Spam Buster steps in. It generates pages with bogus email addresses (mostly .com and .net, but all others, too). Lots of bogus addresses will render email collections useless. Also, most spammers use "relay" email servers. These servers allow anonymous users to send emails. With lots of bogus addresses webmasters of relay email servers will receive lots of bounces which will encourage them to switch relaying off. No relaying, no spam.

Spam Buster outputs 2-6 links back to itself which means that each time a spider reads the page it will add another 2-6 links to Spam Buster to its URL database. That way it will waste quite some time at your web site just for the purpose of grabbing lots of junk email addresses.

Installation/Use: Installing and Using this program is very simple. Just cut and paste the code in this box and paste it somewhere on your page. At the very bottom of your page near the copyright to your site will work. The spiders will find it just fine. Also, some spiders will come in through your other pages, so you are encouraged to paste the code on as many pages as possible. Since the code is at the bottom of your page, and is only a 1x1 gif, there will be no additional load time to your pages.

If you want to see what the spiders are seeing and crawling, take a look at This Page. While your there, click around on the different links. Remember the spiders are following links too!

Robot exclusion:

Spam Buster generates the following meta tag which will prevent well-behaved search engine spiders from indexing the page and from following the links: This may not work for all "good" spiders out there so you should also add a robots.txt file to your virtual root directory. Example:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /secret/

All well-behaved spider will read the robots file http://your.domain.com/robots.txt and ignore all files in directories "cgi-bin" and "secret".

Ethical considerations:

Yes, bogus email addresses will cause additional spam traffic. I believe that this is a reasonable price for fighting spam. The more postmasters turn relaying off, the more difficult it gets for spammers to find a spam email server. And selling email databases will get more difficult, too. No-one will spend money for an email database with lots of fake addresses.