Patent ID: 7631044

Claim:
A system for inhibiting or suppressing delivery of undesirable email messages through vulnerable systems comprising: an emulator that emulates one or more vulnerable systems that can be used by spammers to relay, forward or otherwise send undesirable email messages to target systems; and a module associated with the emulator, the module configured to intercept undesirable email messages that spammers attempt to relay, forward or otherwise send to target systems using one or more of the emulated one or more vulnerable systems, and send replies back to spammers, in response to spammers' attempts to relay, forward or otherwise send undesirable email messages to target systems using one or more of the emulated one or more vulnerable systems, wherein at least a majority of intercepted undesirable email messages are prevented from ever being relayed, forwarded or otherwise sent to target systems using one or more of the emulated one or more vulnerable systems, and wherein, in order to make it appear to spammers that undesirable email messages are successfully being relayed, forwarded or other sent to target systems, the replies sent back to spammers emulate what the spammers would expect to receive had the intercepted undesirable email messages been successfully relayed, forwarded or otherwise sent using one or more of the emulated one or more vulnerable systems, even though at least a majority of the intercepted undesirable email messages are never relayed, forwarded or otherwise sent to target systems.