Potential downside to using (very) old domain as spam trap.

David A. Ulevitch davidu at everydns.net
Tue Jul 22 14:27:33 UTC 2003



Hi,

I've recently been delegated a domain of a dead ISP which hasn't existed
in *any* form for about 5+ years.  As a test, we setup an MX for it to see
what kind of mail it would get since we noted a lot of DNS lookups for it.

After going through a few hundred emails it started to look like the
domain might be good fodder for a blacklist.  We couldn't find a single
legit email that passed through spamassassin and a couple other tools.

I've seen people put spamtraps on web pages and at the bottom of emails to
use as blacklist fodder but not a whole domain.

I suppose more rigorous testing could be done to make sure no legit email
is being sent to the domain, but I have a strong feeling that it is very,
very dead.   (It even expired at one point and was available from a
registrar.)

Is this done? Advisable? Experiences?

Thanks in advance,
David Ulevitch

----------------------------------------------------
   David A. Ulevitch -- http://david.ulevitch.com
  http://everydns.net -+- http://communitycolo.net
Campus Box 6957 + Washington University in St. Louis
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