Project Honeypot

I’m not a big fan of Spam especially when it comes from what otherwise looks to be a reputable company.

Spam fills emails inboxes with requests, offers and free money and is an all-around complete waste of time.

In the constant battle between email service providers and the spammers themselves it is, legitimate email newsletters to confirmed subscribers that end up getting caught up somewhere in the middle.

The problem is that email users and the spam filtering that most email service providers use filter out messages based on their own experiences of the messages that come into their inboxes.

Project Honey Pot

Project Honeypot is an attempt to frustrate spammers by identifying bots that scrape websites for email addresses.

It works by setting up email addresses on your website that are tagged to the time and IP address of the visitor. If one of these custom email address starts to receive spam the IP address of the bot that harvested the email address as well as the system that was used to send spam to the unique account can both be flagged as spammers.

This helps to block IP addresses and services that are used to send unsolicited email marketing and hopefully reduce (slowly but surely) the amount of spam hitting your inbox.

WordPress Plugin

If you have a WordPress website you can install the free Honeypot Toolkit. It will automatically insert the Project Honeypot links into your website and start to block IP addresses listed on the project’s list of known spamming offenders.