Online Advertising
Spambot
A spambot is a program designed to collect, or harvest,
e-mail
addresses from the Internet in order to build mailing lists for sending
unsolicited e-mail, also known as
spam. A spambot is a type of
web crawler, that can gather e-mail addresses from Web sites,
newsgroups, special-interest group (SIG) postings, and chat-room
conversations. Because e-mail addresses have a distinctive format,
spambots are easy to write.
A number of legislators in the U.S. are reported to be devising laws that
would outlaw the spambot. A number of programs and approaches have been devised
to foil spambots. One such technique is known as
address munging, in which an e-mail address is deliberately modified so that
a human reader (and/or human-controlled
Web browser) can decode it but a spambot cannot. This has led to the evolution of
sophisticated spambots that can recover e-mail addresses from character strings
that appear to be munged.
The term spambot is sometimes used in reference to a program designed to
prevent
spam from reaching the subscribers of an Internet service provider (ISP).
Such programs are more often called e-mail blockers or filters. Occasionally, such a blocker may inadvertently prevent a legitimate e-mail
message from reaching a subscriber. This can be prevented by allowing each
subscriber to generate a
whitelist,
or a list of specific e-mail addresses the blocker should let pass.
See also
References
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