It seems obvious that different email addresses get different types of spam. I recently noticed that even addresses with nearly identical exposure sometimes end up with wildly different collections.

A number of our spamtrap addresses are “seeded” by hiding them on websites. Put it somewhere that no human visitor will notice, ’cause the harvesting bots will see it anyway. There’s a whole set scattered across this domain, for instance, and even the spamtraps hidden in different areas of this site attract different types of spammers.

My Flash site is the most high-trafficked section on here. Spamtraps there seem to pick up mostly ads for dubious pharmaceuticals, and occasionally mortgage offers. It’s also the most heavily linked-to section, so this is probably the target of spiders that jump from site to site.

The remnants of my Les Misérables site wouldn’t seem to be terribly popular with spammers, but it turns out spamtraps on those pages pick up quite a bit…mostly in Chinese. Back when the site was active, it got linked to by a lyrics site in Taiwan. When it went more-or-less offline, the link stayed.

Spamtraps rotated through the top page of the site seem to collect mostly porn. I’m guessing there’s a class of bots that just look for valid domain names and hit the home page… and they’re mostly used by porn spammers.

The last area of the site that gets lots of spam is this blog. And it seems to collect all of the above.

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