Wpoison - Prevent E-Mail Address Harvesting

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 or Telnet and run 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/