Fighting malware and spam

Spam trap

Honeypot system gathering spam emails

A spam trap is a type of honeypot designed to gather spam emails. It may be a full system operating a mail server, or may simply be an unused address within an organisation, not given out for any legitimate use and therefore known only to receive spam email.

Spam traps may be linked live to spam filtering systems, feeding any mails received into a known-bad list, or may be used for research purposes or testing.