mail/tarpitd: Add new port tarpitd answers SMTP connections and holds them open for as long as the peer can be persuaded to wait. It is meant to sit behind a packet filter rule that redirects known spam sources to it, in the manner of spamd(8) on OpenBSD, and it never accepts or delivers anything. Every reply is a syntactically valid SMTP response, so the sender has no reason to give up, but it is written out one byte at a time and commands are read back at the same rate. Every terminal answer is a temporary failure, so the message stays in the sender's queue and it comes back later to be tarpitted again. The intent is to occupy a slot in the sending botnet's delivery queue for hours rather than to reject mail quickly. Among its tactics are a delayed and optionally endless multiline greeting, detection of clients that transmit before the greeting has finished, padding of the EHLO response, a STARTTLS handshake that never completes, an AUTH honeypot that decodes and logs the credentials bots offer, and clamped socket buffers so the peer's window stays tiny. tarpitd carries no blocklist and applies no heuristics of its own. The addresses come from an external source, such as fail2ban or blacklistd(8), and the only thing that decides whose traffic arrives here is the firewall rule that redirects it. PR: 2973125cc52bcf74
Port details
mail/tarpitd 1.1.0
SMTP tarpit for hosts supplied by an external blocklist
Port info
- Maintainer
- przemyslaw@frasunek.com
- Packages
- latest: 1.1.0
- Upstream
- up to date
- Last update
- to 1.1.0 · 5cc52bcf74
- Quarterly
- not in the 2026Q4 packages
- WWW
- https://github.com/venglin/tarpitd
- Links
- cgit · VuXML · Report wrong data
Install
- Package
# pkg install tarpitdinstalls 1.1.0 fromlatest- Port
# cd /usr/ports/mail/tarpitd && make install clean# make -C /usr/ports/mail/tarpitd config # change options first
- Size
- 25 KiB download · 46 KiB installed
- Depends on
- nothing
- License
- BSD2CLAUSE
- Options
- 0 of 1 on in the package
Show the 1 options that are off
CAPSICUM
Packages by version and architecture
latest
| FreeBSD version | amd64 | aarch64 | i386 |
|---|---|---|---|
| FreeBSD 16 | 1.1.0 | 1.1.0 | – |
| FreeBSD 15 | 1.1.0 | 1.1.0 | – |
| FreeBSD 14 | 1.1.0 | ✗ | 1.1.0 |
quarterly (2026Q4)
| FreeBSD version | amd64 | aarch64 | i386 |
|---|---|---|---|
| FreeBSD 15 | ✗ | ✗ | – |
| FreeBSD 14 | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
version as in the ports tree (latest) or the most common one (quarterly) · different version · ✗ not built · – no packages for this platform. Package sets that have not been rebuilt for 60 days are left out.
Unaddressed and VuXML only (0)
No unaddressed CVE and nothing reported by
pkg audit for the packaged version 1.1.0.Fixed (0)
No VuXML entries for this package.
Problem reports (0) · open in Bugzilla, most recently changed first
None.