Seeing how DNS prefetching is the new fad with browsers, I reckon there’s an easy way to confirm valid addresses of webmail service users:
- Control a DNS to assign unique hashed hostnames.
- Integrate links to hashed hostnames in spam mails.
- If the recipient uses current Chrome, Firefox, etc:
- The DNS prefetcher will resolve the host name,
- Giving you a confirmed hit for the address in your logfiles, since your unique hostname gets resolved.
Kind of reminiscent of the whole “oh, we can have e-Mails with HTML, let’s put in images!” affair. The only thing that might be a bit of a problem for a spammer is getting a domain with DNS server control.
Coole Idee. Aber macht der IE(6|7|8) auch DNS prefetching? Nur dann wär das Massentauglich :)
None of IE[678] do prefetching, but most people are using IE6 anyway as the bundled browser, although many home computer users seem to have installed Firefox, since Firefox usage rates go up over the weekend.
But seriously, if we ever want to get a step ahead in internetz ‘n stuff, we just need to unceremoniously dump IE. into the grinder.