To catch the spambots you need to use the php version and add it to your website. This is due to the way the "email address is handed out" It's unique to each trap and each boot/spider and the address is changed after every hit. When (if) the address is ever used the data from the collection time is stored in a database and can be matched to the spam received / how the boot/spider identified itself, IP, date and time.

For your own spamtrap just get a sneakemail account, create a new address once a week, put it in your sigfile with a warning that its a spamtrap.

Create an account with http://www.spamcop.net/ now you can report all spam that you receive, including the spam from the trap.

To make sure you don't report yourself, your isp, and sneakemail you need to setup the mailhosts that you use. (A lot of mailhosts are already setup so you would only add the ones unique to you)

You help keeping the RBL's (Real Time Blocklists) upto date and working when you submit the spam. If you have your own email server you can subscribe to the RBL's and block repeat offenders.

Here is a honeypot email address kra84us02@sneakemail.com created for this post.

I report any email to this address

Nils

While some people recommend using GMail / Yahoo, I'd recommend using Bluebottle . It gives you 250 MB mailbox space, POP3 / IMAP4 / SMTP + No adverts but most importantly, it has a very nice and functional challenge/response system.

This relies principally on the fact that most spam is sent out automatically via scripts or some program; the return address too are 99.99% fake. When Bluebottle gets new mail and the sender isn't in the ALLOWED list, a mail is sent back with instructions to reply back with your name in the subject line and/or addition of a 4 digit number of your choice. This ensures that only valid email sent by a human gets through. No Spam-bots allowed !

As a bonus, it can even retrieve email from external POP3 servers and Hotmail !

Cool Service !

The challenge system is worse than the original spam, not only will it get most of the challenge email servers on a RBL (real-time block List) but 80 to 90% of the reply addresses belongs to an innocent third party who will have his / her bandwidth eaten up by the challenge and will have to sort through not only spam but spam replies (challenges). I report challenge messages as spam, if the original message did not originate from me. If it originated from me and I get the challenge that email address go on my _do not mail_ list So any reply to me is "spam" if the message did not originate with me.

Bounce messages are easy to deal with when it comes to set up rules, challenge system is a little worse so why should I bother. Look up Google: Email Challenge net-abuse to see the issues discussed.

It's not OK to spam others to avoid spam sent to you.

Nils

Wonderful post mate! 10/10!!!

JaredLeto, welcome to the site!

All your one liners are cinsidered spam. Can you at least explain who is 10/10? Since it's several posts here and some of them are opposing your answer could be applied to any of them. At least try to have an opinion when you place a post.

• I agree
• I disagree
• right on
• you're wron

may say it all to you but the rest of us have no idea what or where you come from. You need to reed the Help, Intro, rules etc on this board.

Nils

I don't think one should need a disposable email cause what if after signing up for a reputable site your email address gets lifted from a bot? That's happened a few times with me. I'd use a disposable email address but then I'd have to look for that one good email amidst one huge load of spam.

so far i've always received spam when using hotmail even though i've never subscribed to mailing lists or published my hotmail address anywhere. with yahoo i only started receiving spam after joining a yahoo groups mailing list. gmail is the best so far, i haven't received a single piece of spam since opening an email account with them five months ago.

i have my suspicions that hotmail releases our email addresses to third-parties....

I doubt that Hotmail actually releases our email addresses to third-parties. It's clearly stated in their legal notices that Microsoft will not share our emaill addresses without our consent. I don't think they will risk tarnishing their reputation by doing such a thing that spammers do.

However, if you opt-in to receive email from Microsoft partners, then it's perfectly alright for Microsoft to reveal your email to their partners.

It would be nice if the major free mail providers would all corolate findings and have one spam database that was closer to perfect than the individual ones then there will be a lot less of it all.

i agree, trekkie. i think everyone's so competitive that they don't want to correlate findings lol. lots of my friends have ditched hotmail for yahoo or gmail because hotmail is rubbish at filtering spam.