Le Morte Du Spam? Huh?
"Le Morte du Spam" is, of course, French for "the death of spam". We can only hope.
Spam, as you probably know, is unsolicited junk e-mail. Like most honest citizens of the net I find it annoying and wish there were a way to stop it from being sent to me and from flooding newsgroups.
The first link on my page -- Le Morte du Spam -- is a web poison link. It links to the cgi program wpoison at the e-scrub web site. This program generates random web pages with bogus e-mail addresses, and links which all generate more random web pages. If you follow the link, you'll get web pages full of gibberish.
The purpose in this is to thwart any address harvester programs that come through. These programs spider through web pages, hitting all of the links, and gathering all of the e-mail addresses they find. Junk e-mailers use these programs to compile lists of addresses to send their junk e-mail to. At first I thought this would only happen if I posted to usenet groups, but I've avoided doing that and I've still recieved junk mail, so I have proof that at least one harvester program has already been through my site here.
The next harvester program that comes through should follow the first link on my page straight to the wpoison program. Unless someone stops it, it could spend days, months, potentially even years harvesting an infinate number of bogus e-mail addresses and adding them to it's database, which hopefully will become so corrupted that it is no longer of any use.
Personally, I hope a lot more harvesters come through, and I hope they all choke to death on this nifty little program. I wish spam mailers all the ill will in the world -- there are better ways of making money than preying on people and violating their privacy.
If you want to know about this program, here is the link, along with some other anti-spam links:
WPoison Program at E-Scrub
Netizens Against Gratuitous Spamming
Spam Delenda Est
Death To Spam
CAUCE -- Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail
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