The BSDly.net traplist is run on very simple principles. The basics:

1. Any mail sent to spamtrap addresses is spam. There are no two ways about it. If you send mail to one of the 26539427 known bad addresses listed at the traplist home page (click here for the full plaintext version), your IP address will end up in my spamd-greytrap for the next 24 hours, and as such will be exported once per hour for that period to the downloadable blacklist, for inclusion in spamd configurations or similar uses. At last count (the latest hourly run completed at Fri Apr 17 22:10:01 CEST 2026 ), the list contained 683 trapped hosts.
2. Mail sent to addresses created for specific purposes (such as feedback on specific events or articles I have written) with content that is not relevant for the stated purpose is spam. Appealing to the vanity of one of these aliases (as in this example) won't get you much traction, but you should demand a refund from whoever sold you that address list. Also, those addresses were never signed up to any list, ever (I would have known), and consequently "unsubscribing" is not an option.
3. Send me spam, and you will be blacklisted for 24 hours at first. If you manage to deliver spam to one of the valid addresses in the domains I run from here, I reserve the right to add the IP address of the machine you abused to deliver your spam to the same blacklist for 24 hours. I decide what merits this treatment, but if you put me on an advertising mailing list without my express permission, you will certainly have crossed that line.
4. I will salt the mine and poison your well. Once again, if you put me on an advertising mailing list without my express permission, you more than likely will find me making an effort to put one or more of the known bad addresses listed at the traplist home page on as many of your mailing lists as possible, too. That way, your own robots will be adding themselves to the blacklist without any active intervention on my part.

Summing up: Stop sending spam, and you won't have a problem. The list is very much a product of automatic response to the traffic that hits this site. I will intervene manually only if it is demonstrated to my satisfaction, politely, that the published list contains errors. If you contact me over a supposed error without checking whether your IP address is currently among those listed, I will charge you my nuisance fee.

Just how much getting your IP address on my blacklist is going to hurt your chances of getting your mail delivered depends on a number of factors. I will not disclose the exact number of regular downloaders or their identities, however it has come to my knowledge that the BSDly.net list is downloaded by both end users and other antispam outfits, the latter likely in order to incorporate in their own offerings.

If you have any questions or concerns, please send me an email.

A few other lists we produce here are available from this directory. Please read the comment at the top of each for links to further explanations.

You can find some further background on my blog, specifically this post and a more recent update.

Note: In The Things Spammers Believe - A Tale of 300,000 Imaginary Friends (also available trackerless but with "classic formatting" The Things Spammers Believe - A Tale of 300,000 Imaginary Friends) we celebrate a special occasion with copious links to earlier screeds. And a few years on, we were moved to write a retrospective, Eighteen Years of Greytrapping - Is the Weirdness Finally Paying Off? (also here), in which it becomes clear that a compact majority of current spamtraps are, in fact, synthetic.