Spamtrap – Print and Shred Spams Automatically

Treehuggers, this is a post that you may want to skip. Bill Shackelford has come up with an interesting way of dealing with spam. Spamtrap receives spam, prints the email and immediately shreds the paper. Of course in this case everything that comes to that email address is spam but I could see getting some satisfaction if I could send all of my manually deleted emails to a device like that.

“Spamtrap is an interactive installation piece the prints, shreds and blacklists spam email. It interacts with spammers by monitoring several email addresses I created specifically to lure in spam and an old unused personal email address I use to lure in spam. I do not use these email addresses for any other communication. I post these individual email addresses on websites and online bulletin boards that cause them to be harvested by spambots and then to start receiving spam.

Because I know that all email sent to these email addresses are spam, I have set the installation to print and then shred each email as it arrives. Simultaneously the installation is feeding spam blacklists on the web with information gathered from all the received spam (a newly added feature). This in turn helps to feed spam filtering systems across the web that are working to
reduce the amount of spam we all receive.

The installation uses a Pentium II computer connected to a wireless network, personal printer, personal shredder, aluminum rails, Spamtrap email addresses, automatic printing software, email client software, antivirus software, and a SpamCop user account. The paper is recycled after the spam email has been shredded. ”