Project Honeypot

11/11 2004 – It looks as if I have to tune down the sensitivity of my Junk filter somehow. Today I found a really interesting mail in the Junk basket.

It’s from Matthew Prince, CEO of Unspam, LLC, who has recently launched Project Honeypot, a distributed system of decoy email addresses that website administrators can include on their sites in order to gather information about the robots and spiders used by spammers.

It sure looks interesting:

Nikke Lindqvist —

Searching the web I came across your blog post from a few months ago regarding SpamPoison. I wanted to let you know about a related and complementary project we just launched. The goal is to create a distributed network of honey pots to track spam harvesters and share the information with the entire Internet community. While SpamPoison fills the spammer’s database with with invalid emails, our project aims to insert emails that will serve as landmines whenever a spammer sends to one. Called Project Honey Pot, I thought you might be interested:

http://www.projecthoneypot.org/

We’re just getting started and still are working out the rough edges. With two weeks of being open to the public, we already have hundreds of honey pots installed on literally every continent (other than Antarticia, unfortunately). I think we need about 1,000 before we begin receiving meaningful data on a fairly real-time basis.

As someone interested in efforts to stop spam, I would value any feedback you have. Please also do not hesitate to pass along information about Project Honey Pot to anyone you know who may be interested.

Thanks for your help!

Cheers,

Matthew Prince.

CEO, Unspam, LLC