A method and apparatus for employing honeypot systems to identify potential malware containing messages whereby a decoy system to receive illegitimate e-mails is established. E-mails sent to the spam e-mail honeypot decoy are initially scanned/filtered and e-mails that are not considered possible malware containing e-mails are filtered out while the remaining e-mails sent to the spam e-mail honeypot decoy are identified as potential malware containing e-mails. One or more features, and/or feature values, of the identified e-mails are then identified, extracted and ranked. Once a given feature, and/or feature value, occurs more than a burst threshold number of times, the status of the given feature, and/or feature value, is transformed to that of suspicious e-mail parameter.