Eighteen Years of Greytrapping Retrospective Published

Contributed by Peter N. M. Hansteen on 2025-08-11 from the oodles of imaginary friends dept.

OpenBSD users and aficionados are more likely than others to be familiar with the concept of greytrapping (the nastier kid sister of greylisting), as implemented via the OpenBSD spamd(8) spammer taunting software.

The feature has now been around for 18 years, and undeadly.org co-editor Peter Hansteen found that and another milestone to be a good reason to write a retrospective:

Friends, it finally happened. On August 7th, 2025, the number of spamtraps intended to woo the unwary spammer rolled past the number of inhabitants in my home country of Norway. It's time for a retrospective.

So I wrote up one: Eighteen Years of Greytrapping - Is the Weirdness Finally Paying Off? (also available with G's trackers here) is a retrospective article with data and graphs.

That's right, we've been making life harder for spammers for 18 years. Peter's writeup has links to data, and more field notes and war stories than he could actually remember writing when he started on the retrospective.

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