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Document ID:	352
Subject:	What is a honey pot for spam
Creation date:	3/4/09 12:43 PM
Last modified on:	3/13/09 7:58 PM

Honey Pot

Often spammers send emails blindly to several email addresses without verifying if the address belongs to a real person. Honey pot is a mechanism to trap such email and analyze their content. Since the actual addresses are invalid no one gets these emails but the server builds a pattern based on these messages and assigns scores to emails where the pattern matches and is associated with a real person.

For example, you create honey pots for the following fictitious email addresses.

• bob@yourcompany.com
• mark@yourcompany.com
• mary@yourcompany.com

Ideally, no email should be sent to these addresses since they don't belong to anyone. However, a spammer does not know this and if an email comes to such address the server can find out:

• The IP address where the message came from
• Parse its contents for certain keywords, web addresses and phone numbers

Using this information Xeams can assign score to messages that have the same pattern.

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