spambot

A spambot is a robot that sends spam to email addresses and discussion forums on the Internet and collects email addresses to create mailing lists to send spam through. Spambots collect mail addresses from websites, newsgroups, from chat rooms and from other sources.

Spambots can also place targeted text to discussion forums and guestbooks to improve the link popularity of their websites.

To prevent the placement of unwanted advertisements, they can be filtered out with a spam filter. The collection of mail addresses, which can be easily recognized by their structure, can be restricted by modifying the e-mail addresses.