[Spambayes] spampot -- spam honeypot server

[Neale Pickett]

So the spam conference was great, etc. etc.  The best thing was that I
met a bunch of intersting people. From talking with folks, it sounds
like my spampot program might be of interest to the general public.

Spampot is basically Jackpot, but written in Python.  Right now I'm sure
Jackpot does more than Spampot does.  But I'm not sure Jackpot saves any
of the messages it traps, and I have a feeling spampot will run on more
platforms.

For those unfamiliar with Jackpot, it comes up looking like an SMTP
server, and will relay messages it thinks are probe tests.  Everything
else just goes to the bit bucket.  With spampot, 5% of the incoming spam
is saved to disk so you can look at it later.  This is of critical
importance to anyone who's writing a spam filter, because this way you
get pure unadulterated spam as it would come in to your SMTP server.
Contrast this with something like SpamArchive, where you get all sorts
of messages of variying quality, forwarded and sullied by who knows
what.

The first night I ran spampot on an IP with no DNS entry associated with
it, I got a probe after four hours.  After I'd fixed the probe relaying
logic to relay that type of probe, it took all of ten hours for me to
collect over 400MB of spam.

If people are interested enough in this, I'll make a separate mail list
and web page for it.  But for now it's available at
<http://woozle.org/~neale/src/python/spampot.py>.

Happy hacking.

Neale