Project Honey Pot

Project Honey Pot will not end spam, but it has lots of potential. It could put many spammers out of business by providing the data necessary to catch them. It could raise the barrier of entry and lower the profits of the spam business, persuading would-be spammers that it's not worth the trouble. And it could prod legitimate marketers to act more responsibly and send e-mail only to those who verifiably have agreed to receive their pitches.

Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it.

At its core, Project Honey Pot is a collection of people from around the world working together to track email harvesters and help stop spam.

To participate in Project Honey Pot, webmasters need only install the Project Honey Pot software somewhere on their website. Project Honey Pot does the rest — automatically distributing addresses and receiving the mail they generate. As a result, Project Honey Pot should not increase the traffic or load to your website.

Harvesting email addresses from websites is illegal under several anti-spam laws, and the data resulting from Project Honey Pot is critical for finding those breaking the law.

The data participants in Project Honey Pot will help to build the next generation of anti-spam software.