Interesting project. I think I will start using it. I hope they find a way to detect situations where spammers hijack an IP to use for harvesting and/or spamming

To contribute to the DNS-bl you must be one of the following:

    * a commercial DNS provider
    * a free DNS provider
    * a dynamic DNS provider
    * a URL or email forwarder
    * any other entity that provides DNS to a large number of third party domains

There is a way to detect situations like that. It's used by a lot of companies with their own email servers and it's used by some ISPs (or they use their own version). Emails contain headers - wow what a revelation - when you read the headers you can find the IP address the spammer used to mail the spam.  ...
Nils

Very interesting project. I joined and am now scattering the links all over my site.

The idea is great and it's really easy to participate and it doesn't take webspace nor bandwidth much.

I know email headers hold sender IP details, what I meant is that there is a need for a technology that can distinguish between offending IP addresses and victimised IP addresses that are used to spam. Right now, I can't think of any such approach which would not involve the collective effort of everyone whose IP address could potentially be hijacked. At the moment, the only way to verify that an IP address has been hijacked is to ask innocent people who see their IP addresses listed as suspected offenders to report their innocence and that is not enough because under the right conditions an offender can plead innocence too.

Honeypot is a great project idea and so far looks very promising but they need to focus on closing all loopholes

A way to stop spam are identifying the top spam harvesters, and shut them down before they reach your mailbox. The time you get spam at a new email address can vary. If you never give out the address on the Internet and the address are not just a first or a last name you may not see spam for years. If you create a website and put your email address anywhere on the page, eventually it will be harvested by a spam bot.

Munging the address may help, same if you use ASCII characters that will prevent harvesting for a while.

A lot of the block lists used by email providers come from users reporting spam and email hitting spam traps. Project Honey Pot are going one step further by identifying the spam harvesters and bot / spiders they use to crawl over your web-space using your bandwidth stealing your email addresses.

This is achieved by handing out a unique email address to every hit on your spam-trap. If a bot follows the link to the honey pot and harvests the address it will be logged. When an email hits that particular email box a spam harvester are identified.

It’s a few different ways we can help stop the harvesters and help reduce spam. You can host a honey pot on your website or if that is impossible (like it is for me at the present time) you can put a link to the Project Honey Pots website and help educate others. The last way to help is donating MX addresses to the project. The more MX addresses they have the more variety of spam-traps can be created.  If you have a domain name that you are not using donate up to 5 MX records for each domain name.

To learn more about the project go to .        Stop Spam Harvesters, Join Project Honey Pot

I’m using the button on company web pages and will add a honey pot as soon as an “.asp” script are ready. I have an average of 5000 to 10000 spam per day hitting a email server with less than 200 users. The 50 to 250 that slip through the filters and spam assassin I report.

Nils