Hi all --
It occurred to me recently that maybe quite a lot of the innards of spamtrap systems are being kept more secret than they need to be, and a public mailing list for spamtrap operators would be well worthwhile.
There's a number of things that would be improved through sharing our techniques, suggestions, possibly even data --
- new scaling mechanisms;
- what to do with all that spam - where to report, ways to analyze it, etc.;
- new protocols for dealing effectively with massive quantities of spam - for example, using SMTP to deliver spamtrap data is not necessarily required, since reliability isn't as important for spam forwarding as it is for ham, considering the volumes;
- an "open source" approach to the problem; there's currently a lot of secrecy, and probably more than is really required (as long as we don't spill the beans on what domains and addresses we're collecting from). Being able to share thoughts can be very useful, esp. when someone notices some new spammer behaviour.
The list info and subscription page is here:
http://lists.taint.org/mailman/listinfo/spamtrappers/
--j.