could somebody please tell me what a spam bot is?
I think it’s what you would be if you did this same stuff in more than one community.
If you automated yourself.
I’ve been once assisting the cybercops before the arrest of a Nigerian group of spammers.
They’ve used a program called mailspider-pro on the computers of internetcafe (with clients that boot an image from a bootp server; so all evidence got lost…).
During the voilent part I ensured the computer was not switched off, and so I’ve saved it somewhere.
(3 of the spammers got “free housing” for 18 months).
This specific program was starting crawling urls from bigger searchengines, with your keywords as input.
And so I’ve used “unicycle, unicyclist, juggle juggler” untill I had 1000 e-mail addresses in about three minutes.
(I almost recognized all).
So spammers can do their “direct marketing” very targeted…
still I wonder why I got all those viagra offers. Or enlargements.
For each e-mail an inch… and I’ll become the first man on earth AND on the moon.
But in an e-mail from the microsoft intranet I’ve read that even Bill Gates complains about receiving mailings about refinance.
Samspade for windows is a free tool (or used to be it), that has one option that works (or worked) kind of the same: http://www.samspade.org/ssw/
I sometimes use it to find backdoors to unreachable companies.
Another program I learned more about -after dicussing a local security issue on one of the desktops of iaea.int (yes!)- was a program called atom2000.
This program left faked referers while crawling.
But again this is a spam bot of the same kind.
Till now open relays used to be it. But after blacklists like ordb.org and spamcop.net, the hot thing nowadays is faking referers. In Google they search for scripts use
<input type="hidden" name="To" value="ex@mp.le" />
<input type="hidden" name="Cc" value="another-ex@mp.le" />
<input type="hidden" name="Bcc" value="secret_ex@mp.le" />
like for example the widely used perl script called wel.txt.
If you type in specific html code, google returns pages that contains these snippets… and so you find your man in the middle atack victom.
Then type on an regular unix console
$ man wget
and read section
–spider
and
–referer
And use your imagination in an easy to create shellscript that does dynamic HTTP request like
POST http://serv.er/script.cgi?To=victom@target.com&Subject=Viagra&data=special%20offer with the correct referer faked.
Also I’ve allready seen they use Google, spellcheckers, html-validaters, or translators like Babelfish as proxy.
Then as admin try to find out where the request realy came from, or how to block it.
(just get rid of this stupid antique worthless scripts!).
Leo’s post actually makes complete sense to some people. You may know one of these people without having a clue that they have this ability.
dear god almost all of it made perfect sense to me as well!! 
so why have I still not done my IT coursework, considering I leave school in 3 days time.
Oh yeah, I spend too much time unicycling…
I guess this 82% is measured from behind filters.