Spam Bot

I'm a big fan of tapestry. If you don't know what tapestry is, its a wonderful Java Web Framework. While the learning curve is very steep, but it is very reusable. That's what captured my interest, and soon, it'll be easy enough to learn :D
You can check the official Tapestry site at http://tapestry.apache.org

Well, i was browsing Tassel (Tapestry Searchable Selection of Components), a place where people submit their tapestry component that they think will be useful for others. Wondering around, reading description of each component, thinking about how can this component maybe useful for me, when i stumble on this one.

Name : EncodedMailLink
Description : Component that encodes email addresses into javascript so as to attempt to avoid detection by spambots.

Damn it! So that how it is!

I keep wondering why i keep getting email spam on my inbox. Once i created new email account, and left it for one day without telling anyone about it. The next time i log in, my inbox already fill with spam and junk mail.

Its not only happened to me. Almost every one i assumed experience it. Some people even accused yahoo, hotmail and other provider of selling their user list to the spammers. Well actually it doesn't have to be that way.

As you know online search engine like yahoo, google, etc. Used a software application that they called crawler or meta-bot, to crawl through the internet page by page. For each page they try to find a relevant information of how this page will be index. For example a page about planting flower maybe indexed by flower, planting, or gardening. So this page will be added to the crawler database by the relevant information. So when next time a user type "flower" in the search category of the search engine. This page will be showed as one of the page that has relevant information about flower.

And with the fast pacing growth of online search engine. Finding a crawler application is simple enough as inserting "internet crawler" in google. You will be given a list of option, from free to propietary appliaction.

So as the spammer, all you have have to do is get a crawler, create a sub crawler for specific criteria - Crawler that only index email address they found. And abracadabra the spammer database will fill with email address ready to be spam.

Damn it how can you fight this? No matter how you try to protect your email address. One day there will be a page that will show your email address. Damn, they out smart us again!

Update: Already found one

HS-Crawler
Description :

Email marketing is the ideal way to promote your business. HS-Crawler is a software designed to extract email addresses from web sites, search engines and Newsgroups.