and that can affect the system. So, to prevent receiving legitimate emails in spamtraps, spamtraps are published in a location hidden from view such that only an automated script can find them.

After harvesting the email IDs, spammers start sending out spam in bulk. But, as spamtraps are hidden from normal views, spamtraps collect spam only. These spamtraps do not receive legitimate emails.

Vulnerabilities of using spamtraps

There are a couple of vulnerabilities in using spamtraps. A few of them are mentioned below:

• If spammers can detect a spamtrap, the spamtrap becomes tainted. Spammers may send malicious emails in the spamtrap to control the automated spam detection process.
• Spammers can even send malicious emails to spamtraps with the sender’s address modified to the spamtrap itself. And this can cause backscatter. (What is a backscatter?)
• Sometimes, spammers put lots of legitimate email IDs in the To and CC fields of spam. So, if any of those legitimate email receivers reply to that spam email, the legitimate email address can be considered a spam address by mistake.
• If a spamtrap becomes visible and someone sends a legitimate email to the spamtrap by mistake, that email also will be considered spam.

Spamtraps are widely used by anti-spam systems. This was an introductory article about spamtrap. I hope you enjoyed this.