[59808] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Potential downside to using (very) old domain as spam trap.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Paul Vixie)
Tue Jul 22 10:36:40 2003
To: nanog@merit.edu
From: Paul Vixie <vixie@vix.com>
Date: 22 Jul 2003 14:36:05 +0000
In-Reply-To: <3581.128.252.43.230.1058884053.squirrel@katie.everybox.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
> I've seen people put spamtraps on web pages and at the bottom of emails to
> use as blacklist fodder but not a whole domain.
> ...
> Is this done? Advisable? Experiences?
cix.net, which has been dead for a few years, gets about 50 messages a day
on its MX. the majority is spam, but there's always a handful of messages
from people who mistype "cox.net" as "cix.net", either when sending mail or
when signing themselves up for services (who usually don't do verification).
spamtrapping legitimate personal e-mail that happens to have a mistyped
destination address seems antisocial. but with cox.net's population
numbering in the apparent millions, error theory tells us how many such
mistyped destinataion addresses to expect. (and it's true in this case.)
therefore before you use whole-domain spamtrapping, i recommend looking VERY
carefully at the flows so that you can be sure that "i" isn't adjacent to
"o" on the qwerty keyboard, or some other such problem.
--
Paul Vixie
