Another Technique

It's been a while since an update here... why?, well because firstly I've been very busy with work that pays the bills and secondly everything's working great with the tar pit. I have come across another technique for reducing spam which I may try and take a look at real soon:

http://www.joreybump.com/code/howto/nolisting.html

It works on similar principles to the tar pit in it exploits badly written/implemented mail servers. Will post more info if I find it to be useful.

500 Days in a Week

Just taking a look at the stats for sink.filesys.net (on the left) and note that we're eating about 500 days worth of MTA time every week... which is not bad seeing as we've only been going for a short time.

SlowSpam IRC

If you have any questions about SlowSpam.com, try visiting the #slowspam.com IRC channel at irc://irc.nixhelp.org/slowspam.com. There may be people there that can help.

Yes, it's free!

Just to clear up any confusion about the TarPit service... IT IS FREE! Anyone is free to use it without permission, and without paying us anything. Although if you're about to switch over a very busy domain, please let us know: stu@filesys.net so we can monitor bandwidth usage and bring another server online if required.

Oh, and if you do feel the need to pay for the service, there's a donation button down on the left of the screen... click on it and absolve yourself of guilt.

Live Log File

We're now making the live log file from the TarPit available here. The "public" logfile is updated every minute or so. This is an extract of the real log file to remove all of the debugging messages, but shows every single connection.

The file is compressed using gzip and is a space-delimited text file. The fields in the file are:

time<sp>Close<sp>serial<sp>host<sp>delay<cr>

time - the system time in milliseconds since 01/01/1970 00:00:00 GMT
serial - sequential number for this run of the tar pit
host - reverse DNS lookup or IP address of the connecting host
delay - number of milliseconds spent in the TarPit

Please don't automate fetches of the log file too often as bandwidth is at a premium... so make any automation only fetch hourly at most.

The logfile URL is: http://www.filesys.net/slowspam/logfile.txt.gz

We're Back!

The TarPit is now back up and running on backup hardware, although at the moment, downloads of the software are unavailable. If you'd like a copy of the software please email: stu@filesys.net

Unfortunately we've lost all of the stats from the old machine so the figures on the site here are started from scratch.

Oh, and if anyone wants to donate a fan assembly for a Sun V20z then it'd be very appreciated! ;-)

Ooops

The TarPit is currently down as our server has suffered a hardware failure. A spare part (fan assembly) has been ordered, and in the meantime the service will be moved to a backup machine. Please be patient while this happens.

Statistics

The most popular request that's been made since this site launched is that the statistics from the Tar Pit be made available. Well, I've finally got around to building an automated script to extract the stats from the logs. You'll notice on the left hand side of the screen is a window with the stats inside. These are updated every minute to reflect the current state of the Tar Pit. To see updated stats, just hit refresh on your browser.

Let me know if you'd like any other statistics to be made available.

Statistics

Stats since: 21st September @ 21:09

Emails blocked: 39901
Hours in Tar Pit: 10572.57 (440.52 days!)
Unique SMTP Hosts: 20126


Statistics

Stats since: 21st September @ 21:09

Emails blocked: 25433
Hours in Tar Pit: 6473.15 (269.71 days!)
Unique SMTP Hosts: 12565