> That is exactly my plan....I will place my honeypot server on the > internet, > open up port 25, capture all the gory details, and then dump the email to > null.
But if you do that you won't necessarily get much spam, trust me I've had a number of servers running for a number of years, spam tends to be sent to users. Without users you won't get spam. What you will get will be probing emails which don't give much away. And if you are an open relay you won't get lots of different kinds of mail, just thousands of copies of the same one. d. > From my experience so far, most spammers do not send a test message to see > if the email is actually making it to the end-recipient. No, but they do send a probing message to test if your server is an open relay, and they don't "broadcast" mail at every conceivable username on your system. They use harvested lists, or otherwise validated addresses. One good reason for James not to reject mail because a user is unknown is that by subtraction this allows people to harvest good addresses from a mailserver. There are freeware products out there which do this for this purpose. d. > Thanks to the availibility of cheap dedicated servers (i.e. ServerBeach, > Nocster etc), this is a fun and cheap experiment. Probably more likely to be dull, and make you more enemies than friends. > Ever wonder how spammers survive? Here is the best article I've read on > that topic in awhile: > > http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,57613,00.html This article kind of defeats your argumet, suggesting that it is in fact harvested addresses being used. IMO The only sensible way of dealing with spam is to filter it by content and deny mail from blacklisted relays, even then spam filtering is better carried out at client level, servers can mark spam, but as a false positive is totally unacceptable in most cases it makes sense to delegate the whole task to the client. d. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
