Our most recent bit of research is looking at how spambots use the email addresses that we register. We want to find out if spambots attend the email addresses they register at and if they are using real persons email addresses (to avoid bounces).
We sent out an email to every registered spambot, that’s 225,690 bots (almost a quarter-million) asking that if there was a person at the email address that they reply.
This experiment did not go very well. Surprisingly, we did not receive a single reply from a bot, but we did receive about four replies from real people. Our SMTP server was barely able to handle the load of sending these emails, indeed for several days our server was crashing because it continually ran out of disk space due to the logs that were being collected.
The majority of the errors we received from sending email were related to the fact that the domain did not exist. Secondary issues were messages about the user’s inbox being too full.
Unfortunately, due to the issues we met, we were unable to get a true count of how many emails bounced or were blocked versus what went through. We plan on retrying this if we can find a SMTP host that would handle this kind of load for free. We may attempt to use Gmail, a reputable email agent much more capable than us.
