The Best Anti-Spam Software I Had to Offer in 2004

It's funny how things work out sometimes. According to the last-modified timestamps on the files, I wrote some software back on 2004-12-04 to reproduce a primitive subset of the same features of the OpenBSD spamd software.

That software was put into the OpenBSD distribution some time ago to tarpit spammers by wasting their time. For every SMTP connection, it would perform the normal SMTP conversation, with each character printed only after a certain delay, say a second or more. Once the message is sent, it returns a 4xx temporary error and never actually delivers the message. I decided to try something funny and reproduce the functionality without all that, y'know, structure or clarity.

I put this software on my laptop for a couple of years and forgot about it, but now that I've established a need for it amidst a spam-trapping backup MX that isn't using an OpenBSD platform, it funny how it's been almost exactly two years later that I actually need it.