Honeypot
A decoy set out to attract abusers, in email usually addresses published where only address harvesters will find them, so any mail they receive identifies a spammer.
What it means
Project Honey Pot, created by Unspam Technologies, describes itself as a distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from websites. Participating webmasters install its software, which publishes addresses tagged to the time and IP address of each visitor. If one of those addresses starts receiving email, the project knows the messages are spam and also exactly when the address was harvested and by which IP.
The project shares its data with participants, works with law enforcement, and notes that harvesting addresses from websites is illegal under several anti-spam laws.
In email, a honeypot address works as a pristine spam trap. The same idea is used on signup forms: M3AAWG suggests hidden form fields that only a bot would fill in.
Related terms
Sources
What this definition rests on. The wording is ours; the facts are theirs.
- Project Honey Pot: About usprojecthoneypot.org
- M3AAWG Sender Best Common Practices, version 4.0 (August 2026)m3aawg.org
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