spam spider?

Viewing 4 posts - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

www.Landlords.co.nz
Member
@www.landlords.co.nz
Join Date: 2003
Post Count: 60
September 15, 2003 - 8:39 am
Hi Admins,
If you check out my profile, you will see the email address i used to join this site is unique.
The problem,
today I recieved spam to this address.
I figured that the forums must have my email address listed on the postings or in my profile. This would mean that someones bot/spider could harvest email addresses from the site.
but I logged out, and I cant find it listed anywhere. Were email addresses previously viewable in the forums?
Cheers
Craig
NZ Property Investing News
http://www.Landlords.co.nz
Donna
Participant
@donna
Join Date: 2002
Post Count: 13
September 19, 2003 - 7:00 am
Hi Craig
I am not an admin person but thought I’d share something that recently happened to me. I don’t know a lot about the cyberworld but I created a new email address the other day and have not given it to anyone, not personally or registered it anywhere and I have had thousands of spam email sent to it.[] Must be the luck of the drawer as I have another address that gets very little spam.
Just my view
www.Landlords.co.nz
Member
@www.landlords.co.nz
Join Date: 2003
Post Count: 60
September 20, 2003 - 3:23 pm
Hi Donna,
Im a bit of a geek, so i know the different ways spam addresses are gathered.
Often, especially with hotmail/yahoo or big ISP’s spammers will do a dictionary spam.
ie aaaaaaa@whatever thru to zzzzzzzz@whatever..
which means common/short email names etc are more likely to get spammed
The problem in this case is that my email address on this site is:
[email protected]
(intentional incorrect domain)
ie my email addy is not common, and obviously ive only used it to register on this site.
NZ Property Investing News
http://www.Landlords.co.nz
Administrator
Participant
@administrator
Join Date: 2006
Post Count: 131
September 23, 2003 - 5:16 am
Hi,
Thanks for bringing this to our attention.
The problem with running a public forum board is that shysters like to use it to harvest names and spam people.
You are right to say that ‘bots’ comb the net looking for e-mails, and while we tested Snitz, there is no iron clad guarantee that there isn’t come techie with nothing better to do than crack the forum software.
quote:
I figured that the forums must have my email address listed on the postings or in my profile. This would mean that someones bot/spider could harvest email addresses from the site.
Actually, unless you left your e-mail address in a post then my best suggestion is that they look your url and spammed it randomly.
One thing IS for certain… the details did not come from us as we treat your privacy very seriously.
If you have any further information or ideas about how we can stop people hacking the site then please let us know.
Cheers,
The Admin Team