Came across this today, I can't say I have a problem with it as long as it is only seeking to quash the true spammers and spambots. If we can do some decent policing in our own house, maybe things will get better for all of us legitimate email marketers. Thoughts? source: Project Honeypot
Interesting concept. I do not mind these companies actively policing the true spam on the interweb. However, I think planting honey pots, and other similar activities reek of entrapment type activities. Basically baiting traps, instead of really dealing with the issue at hand, which resides in the in-box. If they were actually dealing with the INCOMING existing spam, that's one thing. But trying to set traps all over the place is really evil handed IMHO. Sure, spam can be annoying but you simply flag it in your inbox and be done with it. All of this other non-sense is simply getting ridiculous, and it's obvious they are simply in this for money (spamhaus feeds, spam software, entortion blacklistings, etc.). Using 'spam' as the great motivator for financial gain. If they could truly eliminate spam, they would put themselves out of business.
The way I read this was that the target was bot users that crawl sites to scrape email addresses. With this I have no problem what so ever. Sure, I can see your point that it's entrapment, but then again who gives a fuck about bots and the people that use them to harvest email addresses? The down side to this is that a legitimate mailer is going to end up with a portion of these addresses due to buying data. Somewhere, somehow, someone is going to end up mailing to honeypot addresses that had no part in taking the information in a less than compliant manner. This is the "collateral damage" of techniques like this. While there's no fool proof way to beat these guys at their game, at least this is a start. :secruity:
