Eighteen Years of Greytrapping – Is the Weirdness Finally Paying Off? (nxdomain.no)

The article recounts an 18-year experiment running “greytrapping” (automatically collecting and creating fake, bait email destinations) on the author’s mail infrastructure, reporting that by August 7, 2025 the number of spamtraps exceeded Norway’s population (about 5.62M vs. 5.60M). It describes how the setup evolved from early greylisting and PF/spamd-based filtering into a largely automated process for harvesting trapped addresses and logging trap history, alongside reflections on how email has become more centralized and vendors/cloud providers increasingly discourage self-hosting. While noting periodic “weird” developments in the wider anti-spam ecosystem, it argues that simple network/protocol techniques once offered substantial operational benefits and continues to frame greytrapping as an evidence-driven, low-drama part of running a mail server.