Installation and Configuration

To install the software, unzip the zipfile to a folder on your system.

The software comes with a number of configuration files, which appear in the installation folder. You should make some changes to these files before running the software in earnest; if all the instances of Jackpot were identically-configured, then the software that spammers use to find open relays could be adapted to fingerprint Jackpot honeypots, and exclude them. There are two main ways to do this:

  1. Edit the file jackpot.properties. This is a textfile containing a number of key/value pairs, where the value is a string that Jackpot uses as a response to various different commands issued by the spammer. There are comments in this file indicating what kinds of edits make sense. In general, you cannot 'break' the software by editing this file (but you could make render your honeypot very easy to distinguish from a real open relay).
  2. If you know how to program in Java, even just a little bit, and you have a Java Development Kit (JDK), you can create a Java class that will automatically be loaded by Jackpot at startup, and will replace some of the logic in the program, making it even harder for spammers to tell that they are looking at Jackpot, rather than a conventional SMTP server. If you want to try this, contact me.
If you are running Win98, then you should use Jackpot.bat to launch Jackpot. You can use this file also on WinNT or Win2K, but you might prefer to use the shortcut jackpot.run. Right-click on this shortcut, edit the working folder to point to the folder where you unzipped Jackpot files, and change the icon to point to honey.ico in that folder.
Jackpot's console window will then have a nice honeypot icon, instead of the default black-screen icon.

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