I'm kind of new here, and new to web design and web issues, so please forgive me if this is an old subject which has been hammered into the ground already.
I've got a little site I set up as a way to learn web design, PHP, MySQL, and so on. In chatting with some other folks, I decided to join those who set traps for the spam bots and feed them a lot of poisoned addresses, link them to other sites which do the same, and so on.
What I've done is to grab 5 inexpensive domains, and set up their DNS "A" records to be 127.0.0.1 - the localhost address. Any mail addressed to any user name on any of those domains will never leave the spammer's server.. although the server will try, sometimes for days, to send it before giving up. It keeps the spam from clogging the net because it never gets sent at all. And there is no chance of accidentally generating a random address that someone else actually owns - or might own in the future.
Then I wrote a page for my own site which looks like a normal index.html page in a directory called /email. The HTML page is actually a PHP page which is parsed by PHP due to a .htaccess file in that directory. When the page is accessed, it generates a random number of 100-1000 bogus email addresses, all pointing to one of those 5 domains. There are some links on the bottom of the page to direct the bot either back to the same page again with a freshly generated list of new bogus addresses, or to some other sites which use different methods of messing with bots.
And finally, to provide a link for the bots to find that special page, I wrote a short article about what I was doing and included the link.. along with the suggestion that it not be clicked unless the visitor was in fact a bot.
So, does this sound like a good approach? If so, would any others be interested in doing similar things, and linking to each other? We could all share our "black hole" domains, so that our lists would have more variety, and any bot stumbling into any of our "traps" would hopefully go on a feeding frenzy and suck up enough bad addresses to really screw up the spammer's address list.
Any comments, thoughts, interest?
Thanks,
Bob