There are plenty of wrongs to right in the world. We can but deal with one at a time…

I don’t know about you, but email spam really annoys me. There’s something repulsive about deceitfully and repeatedly forcing useless products onto millions of people who really couldn’t care less about viagra logo enhancements or anything else on offer. So…

Take Action
If you’ve ever made your email address public on a website, the chances are that it’s been detected by a spam robot and added to its database.

For the benefit of such bots, I’ve written a little script to churn out scores of random addresses, with a link to a page that has more of the same. The result is the SpamPit. May they never come out again…

To Add a SpamPit to your Website…
Either download the code (simply unzip it and upload the three files into the main directory of your site) or go through each part of the code below. You are welcome to modify it and redistribute.

This PHP function will return random addresses within <a> tags:

<?php
function getEmails(){
  // Settings
  $num_letters = 10;
  $num_emails = 70;
  $tld = array('com', 'org', 'net');

  // Generate addresses
  $emails = '';
  for($i=0; $i<=$num_emails; $i++)
    {
      $email = '@';
      for($j=0; $j<=$num_letters; $j++)
        {
          $email = chr(rand(ord('a'), ord('z'))) . $email;
          $email .= chr(rand(ord('a'), ord('z')));
        }
      $email .= '.' . $tld[rand(0, count($tld)-1)];
      $emails.= "<a href='mailto:$email'>$email, ";
    }
  return substr($emails, 0, -2);
}
?>

Simply call the function within the body of your page:

<?php echo getEmails(); ?>

If you want to have an infinite number of urls that call the same page, as in my version, you’ll need to do the following (assuming your site is hosted on an Apache server):

• Save your page as spampit.php
• Create a .htaccess file in your main directory, if you don’t have one already.
• Add this to turn on the rewriting of urls:

  Options +FollowSymLinks
  RewriteEngine On

• Add this rule to capture requests to any url that starts /spampit/:

  RewriteRule ^spampit(/?.*?(\d*)/)?$ /spampit.php?depth=$2 [L]

• Add this PHP function to spampit.php, which returns the url of the next page:

  function getNextUrl(){
    if (!isset($_GET['depth']))
      { $depth = 1; }
    elseif ($_GET['depth'] != '')
      { $depth = intval($_GET['depth']) +1; }
    else
      { $depth = 1; }
  
    $pattern = '/\/spampit\/?.*?\d*\/?$/';
    $replace = "/spampit/$depth/";
    $str = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
    return preg_replace($pattern, $replace, $str, 1);
  }

• You can now add an HTML link within the page to link it to the next page. You can get the href of the link by calling the function you just added:

  <?php echo getNextUrl(); ?>

  For example:

  <a href="<?php echo getNextUrl(); ?>">More addresses</a>

• Finally, you may want to create a robots.txt file so that genuine search engine bots don’t choke on your infinite address book… Add these lines to the file:

  User-agent: *
  Disallow: /spampit/
  Allow: /spampit/$
  Disallow: /spampit/*/

  The first line addresses all (well-behaved) robots.

  The second line is a standard robots.txt rule that to prevent bots indexing any part of the /spampit/ directory.

  The third and fourth lines are extensions to the robots.txt format, followed by some robots, which will enable them to crawl only the first spampit page.

  We are assuming here that a spambot will not care about a site’s robots.txt file and will just go ahead and crawl through everything… Well, let them!

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