Wpoison is a free tool that can be used to help reduce the problem of bulk junk e-mail on the Internet in general, and at sites using Wpoison in particular.

Wpoison helps to combat the junk e-mail problem by effectively thwarting the efforts of junk e-mailers who regularly scan web pages, looking for target e-mail addresses to harvest. (The junk e-mailers subsequently send junk e-mail to all of the e-mail addresses that they harvest from various web sites.)

The idea behind Wpoison is really very simple. Junk e-mailers write programs to automatically scan thousands and thousands of web pages, looking for e-mail addresses which they then send unsolicited junk e-mail to, or which they sell to other spammers. By and large, these address harvesting web crawlers are about as intelligent as the spammers who use and/or develop them, which is to say not very. The majority of these programs can be easily fooled into accepting lots and lots of completely fake and useless e-mail addresses, so long as the bogus addresses in question appear to reside on ordinary nondescript web pages. That is where Wpoison comes in.

Wpoison is what is called a web CGI program. A CGI program is just like any other program, except that its purpose is to generate web pages on the fly and with dynamic content that can be different each time the program runs, which is to say each time the URL where the program is installed is referenced, either by someone's web browser, or else by some web-scanning robotic program.

In the case of the Wpoison CGI program, the dynamic content that is generated each time the program is ``visited'' (by a web browser, or by a web-scanning robot program) is just a list of randomized bogus e-mail addresses, together with a list of randomized web hyper-links.

Now here's the catch... and this is the clever part. Each of the randomized web hyper-links that Wpoison generates looks exactly like an ordinary web hyper-link that leads off to someplace else, i.e. to some different web page having a different web URL. But in fact, that is just a matter of appearances, and the reality is that if you follow any one of these hyper-links, you will actually end up coming right back and executing the Wpoison CGI program again, at which point you will get yet another randomized dynamically generated web page, and that new page will contain its own totally new set of bogus E-mail addresses and also a fresh new set of randomized hyper-links. And of course, each of those new hyper-links will, if followed, lead right back to the Wpoison CGI program yet again, thus starting the whole cycle all over again.

It is important to note that when Wpoison is generating its randomized bogus e-mail addresses (and also its randomized pseudo-hyper-links) it uses an algorithm which makes the total number of different bogus e-mail addresses and pseudo-hyper-links essentially unlimited. In effect, Wpoison is capable of generating an infinite number of different bogus E-mail addresses!

So the basic idea behind Wpoison is to trap unwary and badly engineered address harvesting web crawlers, and to fool them into adding enormous quantities of completely bogus e-mail addresses to the E-mail address data bases of the spammers, thus polluting those data bases so badly that they become essentially useless, thereby putting the spammers who are using them out of business, or at least shutting them down for a time and causing them some major headaches while they try to clean up the messes in their now-heavily-polluted e-mail address data bases.