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

Imaginary friends just beat real people. The author’s “spamtraps” (fake email addresses that catch spammers) hit 5,620,384—more than the population of their home country. Cue the self‑hosted email crowd popping confetti… and the eye‑roll brigade asking if this 2007‑era trick still works.

Commenter bigwheels dropped an OT bomb, linking to a scorchy rant about a big mail provider that “likely does not understand mail at all” and toasting the “email self‑hoster holdouts” with a wink. Meanwhile, learningmore tried to play explainer-in-chief: greytrapping is basically a 24‑hour timeout—suspicious senders get temporarily blocked, and real mail servers try again, so legit messages still land. Simple, right?

Not if you’re daneel_w. They came in hot: greytrapping “hasn’t been an efficient countermeasure for well over 15 years,” arguing spammers now use giant zombie PC armies (botnets) that happily keep retrying. That sparked the thread’s main split: old‑school tinkerers celebrating a quiet inbox and a DIY win vs modern pragmatists saying the bad guys evolved and this trick didn’t. There were jokes about “imaginary friends” outnumbering a nation, and memes about sysadmins nurturing pet spamtraps like Tamagotchis.

Underneath the snark sits a bigger fight: email’s been centralized into a few mega‑providers. The post reads like a rallying cry for the indie email rebels, while critics say nostalgia isn’t a security strategy. Choose your fighter—and your inbox link.