Eighteen Years of Greytrapping – Is the Weirdness Finally Paying Off?

The milestone

It has been reported that on August 7, 2025 the number of spamtraps maintained by the operator of nxdomain.no crossed the population of Norway. The tally cited in the retrospective lists 5,620,384 spamtraps versus Statistics Norway's 5,601,049 residents. Small victory? Maybe. Strange, definitely.

What greytrapping is — and how this started

Greytrapping is a cousin of greylisting: you toss out lots of imaginary recipients and watch who bites. The operator describes a long-running experiment that grew out of a Debian-to-OpenBSD migration, a simple PF ruleset, and the use of spamd with greylisting and blocklists. The project was publicly announced in July 2007 and, over the years, quietly ballooned into millions of decoys while producing spotty logs that only partly survive today.

Why anyone should care

This is a story about more than counting fakes. It’s also about decentralised email culture versus The Cloud. The retrospective argues — and some have argued elsewhere — that major hosted email providers act as if anyone else shouldn't be running mail. Allegedly, their policies and behavior have nudged small operators away from running their own services. For the hobbyists and sysadmins who stayed the course, the noisy fan on the mailserver went quiet long ago; the weirdness paid off in reduced load and a tidy, stubborn little arsenal of traps.

Takeaway

If you run mail, or think about running mail, this is a reminder that weird, small-scale experiments can change your day-to-day life — and sometimes your metrics. The retrospective on nxdomain.no bundles field notes, links and reflections aimed at people who care about self-hosting. Curious? Dive in; there are lessons here for anyone who still believes the Internet should be run by more than a handful of cloud giants.

Sources: nxdomain.no, Hacker News