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spambot

   Also found in: Dictionary/thesaurus, Wikipedia 0.02 sec.

spambot

A program (spider, bot, crawler) on the Internet that gathers e-mail addresses to send spam to. There are countless e-mail addresses on Web site "contact us" pages as well as on blogs and newsgroups. Since they are typically coded in the "mailto" format, which when clicked, causes the address to open an e-mail message window, they are easily located (see mailto:).

Preventative Measures
In order to prevent a spambot from automatically identifying an e-mail address, some Web sites print the address as text and not a clickable mailto: link. Another maneuver is to spell out the symbols with the words "at" and "dot;" for example, "joe at computerlanguage dot com." This requires the user to correct the address by inserting the @ sign and period before sending. A more elaborate approach is to make the address really obtuse (see e-mail obfuscator). See spam, form spam and bot.



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? Mentioned in ? References in periodicals archive
 
Unknown correspondents are sent a challenge that a human being can read and answer but a spambot can't (yet, anyway).
The spam wars: how should the Internet deal with junk mail? by Grossman, Wendy M. / Reason
In June 2004, MX Logic saw the first use of a spambot network to propagate political spam -- German-language spam denouncing the presence of Turks and other foreigners in Germany.
On One-Year Anniversary of CAN-SPAM Act, MX Logic Reports 97 Percent ... by Business Wire
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