OT. Scanning ports and mail abuse

Dear Justin and crew.

I read a few comments lately on hostgator regarding IP blocking. I have to say I can understand why. Today I found out that theplanet.com or someone that uses them were scanning my ports. Needless to say I was damned annoyed. They were particularly scanning an e-mail address associated with an account that is about to expire. The reply I got was of course the party line. Tell us who and send etc. They were not the only ones prying around at this time there were others too.

It just makes me think that these folks who obviously have little better to do than spy on people with very little to hide ought get another day job. I use Sygate for tracking. The trouble is that matching the pings can be a pain and following through. Usually a very nasty mail to the head op works. But in other cases it makes the problem worse.

I am about to scrap all yahoo accounts for the same reason but at least they are honest and tell you they use your info. In a tech company I used to work for the sys admin used to read everything that came in and out. Is it me? Or is it that this tech thing goes to folks heads and makes them think that they are all powerful and cannot be traced or held responsible?

I don't know about folks here? But I take things like this very personally and use that approach in dealing with the problem at hand. I am direct and will not let go. SPAM and other abuse are a real problem and if anyone here will lend a hand I'd like to put up a page with rotating bogus addresses unless anyone else has better ideas.

Sincerely.
Chipfryer.

[AgentElrond]

I can't remember the url, but rather than locally incurring the resource load of a "bot trap", I seem to recall seeing a site that openly invites people to link to them for exactly that purpose - providing SPAMspiders a (functionally) endless list of bogus e-mail addresses.

Re: actual "port scanning", I'm pretty sure that we aren't authorized to scan HG servers for issues ourselves, but if HG doesn't otherwise have/use a tool for same, they may be interested in one that's open source (found out about this one at work):

http://www.nessus.org/

Thanks AgentElrond. A few good points raised. You have a very neat and tidy site by the way.

Regards.
Mark.