Our SPAM honey pot project

We have recently tried to install a SPAM honey pot to capture SPAM mails and uprighteous attempt to rid the world of part of their SPAM problem but then we soon realize that we couldn’t be more wrong.

We have set our mail server in such a way that when we receive a mail to our domain’s recipient, we will deliver it as per normal but if receive a mail not from a local source and not to a local destination, we will accept the mail and then do nothing – no attempt on delivering it but just delivery it to a dummy account.

We initially thought the spammers would probably verify that their test mails get sent to their intended mailboxes and they would be smart enough to know that our mail server is not a open relay. No such luck, they just don’t care. Probably because they are only interested in generating a report to their clients who engaged them, showing that their mails are being delivered.

The spammers probably have their own ring of associates and very soon we are receiving 3-4 SMTP connections at any time of the day. In the end, our honey pot caught 250k of SPAMs just over a period of 2-3 weeks, our overall bandwidth within our LAN deteriorates badly and we did not do the world very much of a favour.

Our glorious attempt ends when we decided that we want our bandwidth, to hell with the project.