I come up with an idea recently but no time to properly test it or research it.

My idea in how to combat them It seems to me that they mainly crawl the web and pick up email addresses.

so,  my plan was to give them what they want. I thought that if we give them millions of crap email addresses through an open source DNN module

Then over time, if they have a billions email address then it devalues the real email addresses that they have since most of the spammers just send them without proper check on if they are real or not.

This is what such a module will do:-

People like us in the DNN community, have many real domains under their control and most of the community runs number of portals.

The module will automatically create crap email addresses for those domains that owner owns

like

joeplumber@salaro.com ; Alisomeone@salaro.com; MickeyMouse@salrao.net and so on

And populate certain pages on the site

so, it creates names like:

Name: joe plumber
Job: Marketing Director
Email: joePlumber@salaro.com

Name: Micky Mouse
Job: IT Director
Email: MickeyMouse@salrao.net


And on every page loads it will create new set of 100s of these imaginary emails and names.

The robots pick them up, since they think they are real email addresses.

Every time they hit the page:-

There will be a new set of email address list created since it generates the name and email address based on a fixed set of rules. It may also change once a week.

I hope that as the result of this:-

Just one site with this module is likely to generate 100,000s of crap email addresses over the year.

10,000 DNN sites with this module running will probably generate billions of email addresses

Initially I thought we could build it and give it for free to the community. But, realized that it is a bigger task for our team can handle. I think it may work better as a community endeavour. Also my logic may have an obvious fault that I have missed out. :( After all this is not rocket science and others must have considered this approach too. So why isn't it out there already.

Salar
 

Salar,

I fear, what will happen is, that the spam is sent to every ever listed account on your mail server, sent by thousands of bots (usually PCs owned by private people, who are not aware, that the machine is infected), spamming your mail server and preventing any mail to get through. You might use your email addresses as "honey pots", to identify IP addresses of spamming machines, but since most of them are dynamically assigned, you might block a number of customer messages as well.

This concept has been around for a long time and is called a "honeypot".

http://www.projecthoneypot.org/

http://spamlinks.net/track-trace-honeypot.htm