Category: spam

You catch more flies…

Following up on the honeypot successes, I’ve had two more since August. One in early October, and one a couple of days ago, both with the original domain (a .gen.nz) I used to donate.

I had wondered if perhaps the more rapid success for the later donations (.org and .com) meant that spammers were more likely to use the .org/.com addresses, but perhaps that isn’t the case (or perhaps it isn’t now).

You should still donate a MX entry if you can.

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Honeypot Success

Nearly exactly a year after I donated an MX entry to Project Honeypot, it was used to catch a previously unknown harvester (Project Honeypot sends an email out to let you know that this has happened). The MX is public, so it could have been harvested from my site (not this one, or the Massey one, or the ihug one) or from anyone else’s that participates in Project Honeypot.

It’s interesting that it took a year (and two days) for this to happen. Does that mean that Project Honeypot has a really large number of MX’s compared to the number of new harvesters arriving? I like that theory more than the one that suggests that there are so few harvesters caught that it takes this long. Of course, it could just have been a fluke, and maybe other people’s MXs are successful more quickly.

The number of harvesters for the site seems pretty low, especially considering the amount of spam that must (because the addresses aren’t anywhere else) come from harvesting it. Perhaps I should adjust where the honeypot links are, to try and make them more appealing.

If you’re not already part of Project Honeypot, and you have a website (on which you can use custom cgi scripts), I strongly encourage you to join. You don’t have to donate an MX entry if you don’t have the ability to do that.

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