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Tools For Combating Spam
By Robert Smith
©2004 All Rights Reserved
I receive more spam email than the average person. I run several domains and use different email addresses to track leads for each product I sell.
I maintain well over 5,000 pages and each page has my email address. On average I receive well over 1,000 spam email messages per day. I am able to filter out 95% of these messages just because they are duplicate messages.
The reason I get so many duplicates is because spamers troll the Internet with little spiders; Robots that look for email addresses and extract them from my webpages
I use the following tools to combat the more hard-core spam and porn.
SpamBots Can't Read ASCII Codes.
Below is a simple tool that Cloaks your email addresses so that SpamBots can't collect them. It's free and it's simple to use. You just enter any email address and it will output a cloaked version in ASCII code to use on your webpages. Your visitors will see the correct email address but the SpamBots will not. This tool can also be used to cloak text or HTML code you don't want people to read in your page's source code. It's small, the whole program is only about 200K.
Email Address Cloaking Program
http://www.smithfam.com/dascii.exe
Cloaked URLs
Last week my 12-year-old daughter asked me to stop a spamer that was sending her porn email every day. She would open an email and about 20 pop-up porn windows opened up and filled the whole screen. There was no way to close the windows other than reboot the computer.
They were using false return email addresses and cloaked URLs to hide the source of the email.
People selling porn and selling software illegally often cloak their URLs so most folks can't figure out who the sender is. However, they are trying to sell something and they must offer at least one way to buy their product, either an order form URL or a email address. You can track them down using their order form URL or order email address.
Finding the Source Of The Spam
Below is a site I found that offers a number of free tools to help you determine where a spam email or URL originated. You can usually find the source and also find the Internet provider as well as the owner for that domain. Most ISPs will shut down illegal sites and spamers when contacted directly. You will also find a tool to decode cloaked URLs there.
UXN Spam Combat
http://combat.uxn.com/
Alternative Decimal URLs
There are ways you can use cloaked decimal URLs in your website. You can use an alternative decimal URL to track an ad or a web page in your server logs.
My website has lots of pages so I haven't tried the following trick; however, I understand you can use decimal URLs to gain additional listings in the search engines. My guess is the major search engines are wise to this trick.
Many Search engines, Free4All and free classified sites only allow one submission per domain or one page submission a day. If you have several lead pages to submit you can use a separate decimal URL for each page.
You can also use a separate decimal URL for each search engine to help you track your traffic in your server's logs.
For more information on how domain names are cloaked the following website will give you 11 different alternative decimal URLs. You just enter your URL in a form and the program provides alternative decimal URLs that work just like your text URL.
Alternative Decimal URLs
http://x42.com/active/ip32.mpl?host=xyz.com
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For example, the following URLs will all take you to
http://www.smithfam.com/
56-bit URL is....: http://282582290768643/
48-bit URL is....: http://1107314057987/
40-bit URL is....: http://7802430211/
32-bit URL is....: http://3507462915/
8/24-bit URL is....: http://209.1024771/
8/8/16-bit URL is....: http://209.15.41731/
8/8/8/8-bit URL is....: http://209.15.163.3/
Additionally; alternative OCTAL URLs:
8/8/8/8-bit URL is....: http://0321.0017.0243.0003/
8/8/16-bit URL is....: http://0321.0017.0121403/
8/24-bit URL is....: http://0321.03721403/
32-bit URL is....: http://032103721403/
I trust you all will use this information in a responsible
manner.
Best Wishes
Bob
ROBERT SMITH
helps thousands successfully market their
Internet based home business. You'll find tons of free marketing tools & resources on his Internet Marketing web
site at: http://www.smithfam.com/
Download "Be Your Own Boss"
http://www.1st-be-your-own-boss.com/byob.exe
You can reach him by phone at: (541) 689-1847 PST, and by
email at.mailto:bob@smithfam.com
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