Design a system's email system so that any messages sent to a particular address will trigger two actions:

- Search for any essentially-identical mail which has arrived in the past week and delete it.

- Add an entry to the incoming mail filter so that any essentially-identical mail which arrives within a week will be deleted.

The spam-bait address could be placed in spots similar to the person's "real" email address, but in ways that no person would mistake it for the real one. Robots that trawl for email addresses would likely grab both addresses, and thus most spam would get sent to both. Consequently, most spam would get filtered automatically without need for any user intervention.
-- supercat, Jun 28 2000

(?) Spider Bait for spam bots http://www.randam-art.com/bait.htm
Fake email address to fool spiders [kgb, Jun 28 2000, last modified Oct 05 2004]

HB: Spamproof email http://www.halfbake...a/Spamproof_20email
12 Dec 02 | From the halfbakery circa Mar 2000. [rmutt]'s idea about how to spamproof an e-mail address. I thought it clever. No idea as to how well it works. [bristolz, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 05 2004]

Not unrelated (but it's more like revenge then protection):

From The Jargon Lexicon:

teergrube /teer'groob/ n.

[German for `tar pit'] A trap set to punish spammers who use an address harvester; a mail server deliberately set up to be really, really slow. To activate it, scatter addresses that look like users on the teergrube's host in places where the address harvester will be trolling (one popular way is to embed the fake address in a Usenet sig block next to a human-readable warning not to send mail to it). The address harvester will dutifully collect the address. When the spammer tries to mailbomb it, his mailer will get stuck.
-- kgb, Dec 18 2000


That's exactly how Brightmail.com works. They toss out spam bait and build automatic filters for them.
-- kschang, Jan 20 2002


Vipul's Razor

Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse

Spamido

You'll find links to all of the above, on Google.
-- archeus, Feb 27 2002


Uh, on my servers i've been doing this since around 1996...

There are also spambaits out there that generate infinite number of fake email addresses for those harvesting crawlers to make their efforts a lot less effective, but that's a different story.
-- yu-, Dec 11 2002


I suggest a third action (for the idea as originally stated).

All email arriving at the spam trap is replied to with "Remove" in the body.
This ensures that the spam merchants keep on sending their new wares to the spamtrap, and any email address resellers will include it on their CDs as an active account.
-- Loris, Dec 11 2002



random, halfbakery