Wpoison - Prevent E-Mail Address Harvesting
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Wpoison is a CGI which can be used to help reduce the problem of bulk junk e-mail on the Internet. Wpoison helps to combat the junk e-mail problem by thwarting the efforts of junk e-mailers who regularly scan web pages, looking for target e-mail addresses to harvest (which they subsequently bombard with junk e-mail).

Installation

Connect to your Virtual Private Server via SSH, su to root, and issue this command:

# vinstall wpoison

Add the mod_rewite Apache Module to your web server by including the following line in your web server configuration file (~/www/conf/httpd.conf):

LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

Usage

In order to properly implement a site inoculation, you will want to use a combination of empty <a href> tags on your home page and throughout your web site similar to this:

<a href="/leeches/index.html"></a>

and then add lines similar to the following to your web server configuration file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT}  ^ExtractorPro.*
RewriteRule ^/.* /leeches/index.html [L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT}  ^EmailSiphon.*
RewriteRule ^/.* /leeches/index.html [L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT}  ^eCatch.*
RewriteRule ^/.* /leeches/index.html [L]

To prevent legitimate Web Robots from indexing the Wpoison generated pages, create an entry in your robots.txt file (or create the file in your ~/www/htdocs/ directory if it does not already exist) to disallow the /leeches/ directory, like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /leeches/

Please note: the information on this page applies to ITS web hosting plans. It may or may not apply to other environments. If you are looking for a feature described here, or better support from your hosting provider, please consider hosting your site with ITS!

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