The term list poisoning refers to poisoning an
e-mail
Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...
mailing list with invalid e-mail addresses.
Industry uses
Once a mailing list has been poisoned with a number of invalid e-mail addresses, the resources required to send a message to this list has increased, even though the number of valid recipients has not. If one can poison a spammer's mailing list, one can force the spammer to exhaust more resources to send e-mail, in theory costing the spammer money and time.
Poisoning spammers' mailing lists is usually done by blacklists submitting fake information to email submit style offers, or by posting invalid email addresses in a
Usenet
Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was ...
forum or on a
web page where spammers are believed to harvest email addresses for their mailing lists.
Vulnerabilities
* Syntactically invalid email addresses used to poison a mailing list could be easily filtered out by the spammers, while using email addresses that are syntactically correct could cause problems for the mail server responsible for the email address.
* Implementations of spam poisoning systems can be avoided, if spammers learn of their location (e. g., they could automatically filter out any address containing "spampoison.com").
* Spammers often steal resources so that the efficiency of a mailing places little financial burden on the spammer.
See also
*
Anti-spam techniques (e-mail)
Various anti-spam techniques are used to prevent email spam (unsolicited bulk email).
No technique is a complete solution to the spam problem, and each has trade-offs between incorrectly rejecting legitimate email (false positives) as opposed to ...
*
Address munging Address munging is the practice of disguising
an e-mail address to prevent it from being automatically collected by unsolicited bulk e-mail providers.
Address munging is intended to disguise an e-mail address in a way that prevents computer softw ...
*
Botnet
A botnet is a group of Internet-connected devices, each of which runs one or more bots. Botnets can be used to perform Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, steal data, send spam, and allow the attacker to access the device and its conn ...
*
E-mail address harvesting
Email harvesting or scraping is the process of obtaining lists of email addresses using various methods. Typically these are then used for bulk email or spam.
Methods
The simplest method involves spammers purchasing or trading lists of email addr ...
*
Spamtrap
A spamtrap is a honeypot (computing), honeypot used to collect spam (electronic), spam.
Spamtraps are usually e-mail addresses that are created not for communication, but rather to lure spam. In order to prevent legitimate email from being invited ...
*
Stopping e-mail abuse
External links
* List poisonin
code written in Perl
* List poisonin
* Simple list poisonin
code written in BASH shell scriptand
working example
* Hosted list poisoning and honeytra
SpamPoison
{{spamming
Spamming