I'm looking for references, module, script, etc. that will help me with a "time" based method of catching email abusers .... the situation:

A public venue (forum) where visitors contact those who post messages. The contact process does not reveal the raw email address of the person being contacted, and it also records the contact event. The abusers of the system (spammers who send inappropriate/unsolicited messages) tend to do so in "bursts" .... many messages being sent to individuals who have posted, with a short time span in between messages. For automated spammers, the time span can be very short .... for the ones who manually paste in repeated content and manually submit (it happens), the time frame is longer.

Rather then reinvent the wheel, I'm wondering if something has been written that alerts, or flags, events that are occurring (from the same abuser) within a specified time range.

I've tried searching the archives, but using "spam" in the search phrase seems to guarantee that the results will be way too deep to wade through. At any rate, before digging in to program something that appears to be pretty straightforward, I thought it made sense to see if somebody's been there and done that in a way that would make anything I tried to put together look awfully weak ;)

In reply to Recognizing repetitive spammers using a time base method by Hagbone

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