Spam Trapping

Quite often, if you've been on the internet for a while, you'll have accumulated a few old email accounts that nowadays get nothing but spam. You can set these up as spam traps using SpamAssassin; see the SPAM TRAPPING section of the
[http://spamassassin.org/doc/spamassassin.html spamassassin manual page] for details.

(Update: this will no longer work with SA 3.0.0, as we have removed the support for responding to emails automatically from within SpamAssassin; however, it should be possible to whip up some procmail to do it quite easily

If you don't want to go to the bother of setting up a system yourself to do this, feel free to set up a simple alias to forward any mails to
<someaddress@spamtraps.taint.org> – replace "someaddress" with something to identify you, such as your email addr or website with non-alphanumeric chars replaced by underscores, or similar. (Please also send me a mail at jm - spamtraps at jmason dot org if you do this, so that I know who to contact if it starts going haywire, or the quality drops.)

Mails sent to an address at the spamtraps domain are fed into the SpamAssassin.org spam-trapping system, where they will then be virus-scanned, de-duplicated, and fed into Razor, DCC, Pyzor and OPM.

Some notes: I monitor the quality of feeds coming into this, and if it turns out to contain occasional bits of non-spam mail, I'll start bouncing your feed with a 550 – as a spam feed that isn't reliably spam-only is *not* suitable for a spamtrap.

Also, messages relayed to the spamtrap must be either (a) direct relaying as performed by a sendmail alias, or (b) message/rfc822 attachments with no Content-Transfer-Encoding. Again, if they're not, I'll 550 them. And finally, if I can't figure out who's in control of the feed, you guessed it, 550. So try to keep the quality control up!

"Direct relaying" means the addition of only the following data:

• a new Return-Path header
• a Received header or two
• possibly some other delivery headers, like Delivery-Date or similar.
  

In other words, the existing Received header data is preserved, along with the body structure, as it was when received.