Posted by Francois Bonzon on 01/13/07 13:24

On 2007-01-13 04:18:25 +0100, Chuck Anderson <websiteaddress@seemy.sig> said:

> Is there a way to make a bot believe that the sending of the email has
> failed? Seems like that would be a deterrent if the spammer sees it is
> not working. Should I serve a server error? Can you do that with
> header()?

IMHO, telling the spammer the e-mail sending has failed is not always
the best solution. If he sees it failed, he'll search - and find,
because spammers are smart - another way to spam you. If he thinks the
message was successfully sent, he'll feel happy and stop here.

In case I detect a spam message, I return the same page as with normal
messages, but simply don't send the e-mail in the background. I even
run a sleep(1); PHP function (waits 1 sec) to simulate the time needed
for the server to submit the e-mail. So that it's not possible to
detect no e-mail was sent, because the time between the HTTP request
and answer is shorter. It should not be shorter when I don't actually
send an e-mail.

Francois

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