On May 9, 2019, at 5:43 PM, Andrew C Aitchison via mailop <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > > Is this deliberate enemy action or collateral damage ? > I'm finding it difficult to see why a general spam bot > would sign spam traps up to a mailing list, > so guess that I am missing something ?
Vast majority of bots that we see and have studied are not doing it intentionally. It’s collateral damage. Most bots that are submitting mailing list forms are just stupid blog comment spam type bots. They think a mailing list sign up form looks like a blog comment form and they submit a random scrapped email address and a name that’s usually some sort of marketing crud. The majority of those type of bot are easy to filter out by looking for things in names that aren’t actually statistically names and throwing them out entirely or putting a CAPTCHA in front of the ones that you’re unsure of. The more difficult ones occur when the bots use real looking names and emails and the actual marketing spam content they would have normally POSTed to a blog comment form gets left off because mailing list forms don’t have the same fields. They can look just like real users and even sending a COI confirmation to those addresses can get those IPs blacklisted. We spend considerable resources detecting and filtering out bot submissions from SMB user websites all over the planet. Some >30% of web form sign up requests are from bots these days. Cheers, Tom Kulzer CEO & Founder AWeber Communications http://www.aweber.com <http://www.aweber.com/>
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