Honeytokens [LWN.net]

Honeytokens

Posted Aug 2, 2003 2:31 UTC (Sat) by jmason (guest, #13586)
In reply to: Honeytokens by jimwelch
Parent article: Honeytokens

BTW, this is common in the anti-spam world as well; create "spamtrap" aliases, seed likely areas with those addresses -- such as embedding
them in HTML comments on webpages -- then wait for the spam to arrive.

Any mail to those addresses is virtually guaranteed to be either spam or a virus, since no human being should know they exist. Any direct marketing mail to those addresses is especially likely to be spam, since they would never have "signed up" to a list.

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Honeytokens

Posted Aug 2, 2003 23:53 UTC (Sat) by simonl (subscriber, #13603) [Link]

So this is what you mean: ?

- Set up a few spam target emails, and spread them around.
- Make the SMTP server calculate MD5 sums of all messages to these spam atrgets, probably removing all instances of username and domain first.
- The SMTP server can now safely ignore/delete any message to valid users which matches the MD5 sum of a known spam message.

This would probably be the most reliable spam killer. Are any spam filters using this yet?