Spam has become one of the most annoying and costly
phenomenon in the Internet. Valid e-mail addresses belong to
the most valuable resources of spammers, but little is known
about spammers’ behavior when collecting and harvesting
addresses and spammers’ capabilities and interest in carefully
directed, consumer-oriented marketing have not been explored
yet. Gaining insight into spammers’ ways to obtain and
(mis)use e-mail addresses is useful in many ways, e.g. for the
assessment of the effectiveness of address obscuring
techniques and the usability and necessity of hiding e-mail
addresses on the Internet. This paper presents a spam
honeypot project in progress addressing these issues by
systematically placing e-mail addresses in the Internet and
analyzing received e-mails. The honeypot’s conceptual
framework, its implementation, and first empirical results are
presented. Finally, an outlook on further work and activities is
provided.