Trap Spammers with Project Honey Pot

Melanie Gross
Jul 1, 2009
Updated • Dec 28, 2012
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Junk mail is always a pain to deal with. Some junk mail may be stuff you actually sign up for and lost interest in. Spam, however, is stuff that you never signed up for and is often sent to you after some bot saw your email address on some site. Nobody like spam. The people that harvest the web for email addresses likely hate spam as well. Spam is actually illegal and there are actually people out there who track spammers and try to make sure they see their day in court.

Project Honey Pot is a system designed with those who receive spam in mind. What this system basically does is sit on a site and watch for email harvesters. When it finds an email harvester, the honey pot logs information about the harvester into the Project Honey Pot system. This information is then built up into various sets of statistics that are used in court to prosecute spammers. One of the things that makes Project Honey Pot cool is that it shows all this data on their website for the world to see. This allows those curious about their own IPs to check and see if they are considered a spammer. It also offers information on various IPs and statistics such as the average amount of emails sent to the honey pot.

Website owners can do one of three things to help Project Honey Pot catch spammers. A honey pot can be added to any website which will watch for and log any suspicious data on that site. This is for those who have a web host and are willing to install the honey pot script onto their site. Those who don't have their website hosted or don't want to install a honey pot can install a QuickLink. When a bot visits a site, they likely visit other sites that the original site is linked to in order to find as many email addresses as possible. A QuickLink is a hidden, secret link that only bots can see and visit. The QuickLink will take the bot to a site that does have a honey pot installed. Another thing that webmasters can do is donate an MX record to the project. What this does is give Project Honey Pot an email address to receive spam. Project Honey Pot will use this email address to see what kind of spam the harvesters are sending among many other statistics. This option is for webmasters who have their own domain name.

Project Honey Pot is a completely free service that survives on donations and tshirt sales through CafePress. They also offer various other services such as a directory where users can look up information about various IPs, including IPs that are known to belong to dictionary attackers.

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Comments

  1. JMGG said on January 19, 2012 at 8:25 am
    Reply

    You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?

    1. BalaC said on January 19, 2012 at 9:42 am
      Reply

      I think its thunderbird

    2. Martin Brinkmann said on January 19, 2012 at 10:15 am
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      It is Mozilla Thunderbird.

  2. Salaam said on September 24, 2012 at 9:52 pm
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    Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.

  3. Claud said on December 19, 2012 at 2:08 am
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    If this is the same bug that I’ve encountered, there may be another fix: (1) hover over open Outlook item in Taskbar, cursor up to hover over Outlook window item, and right-click; (2) this should give you Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize — choose Move or Size; (3) use your cursor keys, going arbitrarily N/S/E/W, to try to move or size the Outlook window back into view. Basically, the app behaves as though it were open in a 0x0 window, or at a location that’s offscreen, and this will frequently work to resize and/or move the window. Don’t forget to close while resized/moved, so that Outlook remembers the size/position for next time.

    1. Lynda said on February 12, 2013 at 3:37 pm
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      THANK YOU Claude!!! I could get the main window to launch but could not get any other message window to show on the desktop. You are my hero!!!!

    2. Chad said on November 20, 2018 at 4:24 pm
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      Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…

    3. Ivan X said on January 21, 2021 at 4:50 pm
      Reply

      Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.

  4. Andrew said on October 26, 2013 at 7:06 am
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    This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)

  5. Charles said on December 7, 2013 at 7:23 pm
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    Thank you so much, this started happening to me today and was causing big problems. You are a life saver, I hope I can help you in some way some day.

  6. garth said on November 7, 2014 at 7:13 pm
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    You are a god – thank you!

  7. Faisal said on February 9, 2015 at 10:09 am
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    thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)

  8. Simon said on March 24, 2015 at 11:36 pm
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    Yah…thanks Claude. I’ve been having the same problem and tried all the suggestions…your solution was the answer. It had resized itself to a 0/0 box. Cheers

  9. Olu said on April 14, 2015 at 1:35 pm
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    Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
    Thank you

  10. Coenig said on July 23, 2015 at 7:36 am
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    Thanks a lot for the article. Don’t know why it happenend, don’t know how it got fixed, but it was really annoying and now it works :-)

  11. Fali said on January 20, 2016 at 4:19 pm
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    Thanks a lot. I was facing this issue from past 3 week. I tried everything but no resolution. The issue was happening intermittently and mainly when I was changing the display of screen ( as i use 2 monitors). The only option i had was to do system restore. But thanks to you.

    1. MIki said on January 10, 2019 at 11:54 am
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      I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!

  12. Christina said on January 20, 2016 at 6:14 pm
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    Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007

  13. Oz said on July 22, 2016 at 3:20 pm
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    Great tip! Thanks!

  14. Tracy said on September 1, 2016 at 4:48 pm
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    Worked for me, too – thank you!!!

  15. shawn said on September 9, 2016 at 10:25 am
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    It’s Worked for me, too
    thank you very much!

  16. Jari said on October 31, 2016 at 11:53 am
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    I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!

  17. Michel H said on November 30, 2016 at 11:08 pm
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    Thank you so much. Solved!
    Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
    Thank you again. M

  18. Ziad Bitar said on January 9, 2017 at 2:00 am
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    This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.

    Thanks.

  19. Anonymous said on February 15, 2017 at 5:24 pm
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    Great tip. Thank you!!!! If it helps, I had to use the Control Key and the arrow keys at the same time to bring my window back into view. Worked like a charm.

  20. Rochelle said on March 6, 2017 at 11:59 am
    Reply

    Thank you, this worked !!!!

  21. anom1234 said on May 20, 2018 at 11:20 pm
    Reply

    Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!

  22. JC said on October 12, 2020 at 2:14 pm
    Reply

    Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!

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