Spambot

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A spambot is a program designed to collect 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, or rendering the text into a web browser and then scraping the rendered text for email addresses. Another technique is to save the email address text into an image file and display the image on the web page, where users are then able to see the address. Although this method combats spambots, it is not compatible with web page accesibility standards and also disables hyperlink capability - users are not able to click the address to send an email.

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.

Another type of spambot surfs the web, looking for forms to submit, and it submits spam e-mails to these web forms, often with OCR technology to bypass any CAPTCHAs.

There are also spambots used to post spam links to guestbooks, wikis, blogs, forums and any other web forms to boost search engine ranking.

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Email Address Harvesting: How Spammers Reap What You Sow by the US FTC

v • d • e This article is part of the Spamming series.
E-mail spam	DNSBL • Spamhaus • Anti-spam techniques • Spambot • Address munging • SORBS E-mail authentication • Directory Harvest Attack • SpamCop • Dictionary spamming
Spamdexing	Google bomb • Keyword stuffing • Cloaking • Link farm • Web ring Referer spam • Blog spam • Spam blogs
Telemarketing	Autodialer • Mobile phone spam • VoIP spam
Scams	Phishing • Advance fee fraud • Lottery scam • Make money fast • Pump and dump
Misc.	Messaging spam • Newsgroup spam • Flyposting History of spamming • Network Abuse Clearinghouse