The crawlies have found my hooks

The seeded address that I lost back in March (Lost in the ether) turned out to be hidden in the most straightforward place - on my home page for the first domain I ever registered.

It has turned out to be one the most successful spamtrap seeds, considerably out-doing the dynamically generated email address present on the same page.

The dynamic address includes a static component as well as the day and IP address of the computer that accessed the page encrypted with a simple Caesar cipher to make it look like a long english address. Enough information to find the all related accesses in the web server logs. Every different host getting a different email address must make it look too fishy for the spammers as I've only recieved one spam on that type of address, while the static address has been getting progressively more emails as the months go on.

Since starting this adventure, only 4 of 50 seeded addresses have given any results at all and only one has received multiple messages. The email addresses I have actually used in the past to subscribe to published mailing lists, bug trackers, and forums have been a consistently strong source of spamtraps. The best ones have always been on well indexed on a number of sites, or included in the source code.

There are a number of other locations I have considered planting seed addresses that I haven't had the opportunity to explore yet, but I expect to play with them in the coming months. They should provide a significantly better success rate.

died in a blogging accident

http://xkcd.com/369/

Oh come on .. it's funny! Thousands of people writing the sentence "died in a blogging accident" all because of an amusing comic and not a chance in hell of finding what happened to the 2 people that died :P

I feel dirty for posting it on a fake blog

don't ever email
aadamrandome@atarandomdotcom.com

Lost in the ether

Darn it, I seeded an address onto the net somewhere but I can't figure out where! I have been keeping a record of where I put each address and when I did it so I can find the best avenues for growing as many seeds as I want.

Regardless I'm still rather displeased with the amount of crud I'm getting. In the 2 months since I started this, there have been 2 unsolicited mails to two different addresses and that's it. Either they're getting smarter and more discerning about where they pick up the addresses, or I'm just not putting them in the right place any more. It's probably a mix of the two. It is rather frustrating.

Today I will add a link from the atarandomdotcom.com webpage and see if that helps at all. Perhaps I should start posting my blog in other peoples' blogs when I find something useful to comment about .. urh .. seems so wrong and evil.

Doing something I detest to help pick up people doing things I detest. Seems I'm heading towards the grey.

The ultimate irony of it all? No one on the planet except me is ever going to read this crap :P

Why?

Well, I've been trying to get a few email addresses out there where anything and everything can pick them up for the purpose of getting crap. Not just any crap though, I want crap that someone doing illegal activities to obtain the address thinks that I might be daft enough to be interested in and read. Then I want that same person to pass it on to all this pals.

Oh well, here goes nothing.

The following site is really boring and only serves the above mentioned goal.
AtARandomDotCom

May as well put an address here as well and hope that something picks it up. aadamblogspot@atarandomdotcom.com !
Don't email anything to that address.