Spam Trap

One Night Of Spam Trap Makes A Hard Spam Humble

Spam Trap is a CGI gizmo that generates potentially infinite numbers of bogus email addresses to clog up spammers' databases when their email-collecting bots come visiting - and they will come visiting; just wait. Luckily for you and me, they're a lot less intelligent than humans are, so it's easy to fool them. I'll leave it to you to decide whether I'm talking about the spammers or their bots.

CGI Jive - Man Alive

The first thing you need to run Spam Trap is a Perl-capable webserver (Apache is the only one I'm familiar with; there is a good tutorial on their site about using CGI scripts if you need it), and the HTML::Entities Perl module installed.

The other and final thing you need is a word list for the script to plunder. Edit the config bit at the top of the script to tell it where your word list is. If you don't have one, there's information coming in a moment that tells you where to get one. As of version 1.3, you have the option to use a separate file for the names in the email addresses it generates; the demonstration on this site has this option set.

Note:
I HIGHLY RECOMMEND that you rename this script to something more innocuous. The best thing to do would be some webserver configuration magic so it can run without the ".cgi" extension and thus masquerade as an actual directory. For maximum effectiveness, contrive a hidden link on every page on your site to the script.

Trap My Bitch Up

I was inspired to write Spam Trap as a replacement for Wpoison. The reasons why:

  1. Wpoison is written in C, when Perl is the obvious choice for CGIs that shuffle chunks of text around.
  2. Wpoison has a bloody stupid license demanding you put its logo on your home page. Yeah, right!
  3. Wpoison has a puny list of of about 4,000 words hard-coded into the source. Spam Trap lets you pick a word list of your own choice (see below), so you can tailor the output's appearance to match your site's language or topic.
  4. Wpoison output doesn't look like real pages at all. There's no punctuation, and it always has a huge list of links at the bottom of every page. Spam Trap scatters links through the page, adds punctuation and capitalisation and a page title that corresponds to the "location" in the URL. It also generates an apparently infinitely-deep system of fake directories to further confuse the script.

Your Words Don't Mean A Thing

Spam Trap doesn't come with a word list by default. Most UNIX and Linux variants come with one, usually located at /usr/share/dict/words, /usr/dict/words, /usr/share/lib/dict or somewhere like that. The canonical source is the Oxford wordlists collection, which has a variety of great lists. Packet Storm also have a fine selection.