Project Honey Pot is a group that collects and collates data on harvesters, spammers, dictionary attackers, and other bad actors, and they make this data available for spam filterers and those looking to sue spammers.
Email address harvesting, the process of obtaining email addresses by extracting them from public information sources (such as web pages) via automated means, has long been a common way for bad guys (spammers) to build up their spam lists.
According to the folks at Project Honey Pot, harvesting is illegal under CAN-SPAM. "The law defines every message sent to a harvested address as "spam" and imposes potential liability on the sender. This is regardless of whether the sender complies with the law's other requirements. In other words, including an opt-out link and following the Act's notice regulations is not enough to spare bulk mailers sending to harvested addresses from liability."
Not everybody agrees that this interpretation of how harvesting is handled under CAN-SPAM is correct. Regardless, mining public data sources for email address clearly is not the best path. Even if it were universally believed to be legal, ISPs are quick to block spammers. Mailing to harvested email addresses is one of the quickest ways to get yourself tagged with the "spammer" label. If you want to get your mail delivered, you don't harvest email addresses. It's that simple.
Email address harvesting, the process of obtaining email addresses by extracting them from public information sources (such as web pages) via automated means, has long been a common way for bad guys (spammers) to build up their spam lists.
According to the folks at Project Honey Pot, harvesting is illegal under CAN-SPAM. "The law defines every message sent to a harvested address as "spam" and imposes potential liability on the sender. This is regardless of whether the sender complies with the law's other requirements. In other words, including an opt-out link and following the Act's notice regulations is not enough to spare bulk mailers sending to harvested addresses from liability."
Not everybody agrees that this interpretation of how harvesting is handled under CAN-SPAM is correct. Regardless, mining public data sources for email address clearly is not the best path. Even if it were universally believed to be legal, ISPs are quick to block spammers. Mailing to harvested email addresses is one of the quickest ways to get yourself tagged with the "spammer" label. If you want to get your mail delivered, you don't harvest email addresses. It's that simple.
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