As the Spam Turns

Anonymous writes "The SBL has added Verio's corporate mail servers to its blocklist which protects nearly 100 million mailboxes, because of the number of spam gangs on the Verio network. Verio also provides connectivity to AS26212, a collection of 9 of the most notorious spammers netblocks. AS26212 - the new spambone? - is also connected to he.net and bbnplanet.net."

Comments

Oh no!

[Yoda2]

Now how will I know the best way to enlarge my penis or get that degree from a fine, unaccredited institution?!

Re:Oh no!

[NotAnotherReboot]

Well, those were once in a lifetime opportunities anyways so I'm sure you'll never get an offer like that ever again.

Spam comes from unlikely places...

[GreyWolf3000]

I got a Nigerian money scam today with a yahoo address in the header.

I replied with a cheap goatse.cx link. It went something like "Sure, I'll do it--but can you please check my [a href="http://goatse.cx"]website[/a] tomorrow--I will post a picture of an open door to indicate that you have been granted the go-ahead. If not, it will mean I need another day for my paperwork to be prepared. I have been having troubles with my bank lately, and they might be looking into me, but fortunately I have the right friends. I think email is much too insecure for this." I guess trolls do provide something useful for the community.

Re:Spam comes from unlikely places...

[Jucius Maximus]

" I got a Nigerian money scam today with a yahoo address in the header. I replied with a cheap goatse.cx link. It went something like "Sure, I'll do it--but can you please check my [a href="http://goatse.cx"]website[/a] tomorrow--I will post a picture of an open door to indicate that you have been granted the go-ahead. If not, it will mean I need another day for my paperwork to be prepared. I have been having troubles with my bank lately, and they might be looking into me, but fortunately I have the right friends. I think email is much too insecure for this." I guess trolls do provide something useful for the community."

Haha, that is good, but I can one-up you on that... I've told this story recently in another slashdot thread but I'll actually post the guy's response this time.

Here is my response to the original spam:

Hello, Mr. Abu, it is wonderful to be doing business with you!
My name is James Kirk with phone#202-406-5850 and fax#202-406-5031. [these are the phone and fax number for the US Secret service electronic crimes bureau]
Company: Utopia Planetia Fleet Yards
Company Address: 33601 Lyon Street, San Francisco CA 94123
I look forward to receiving this money!
-James [yes, the james kirk name was inspired by the haxial.org thing]

The guy e-mailed me back and asked me to phone him on his private line. I looked up the phone exchange and it indeed was in Nigeria.

Then I got another e-mail from him an hour later:

Subject: WHY?????

Dear Kirk,

If you were not interested in assisting us, you sholud have kindly told us so
that we can look for another foreign partner who might be interested in
assisting us, instead of agreeing to assist, and giving the number of your
secret service for us to contact.
Why could'nt you be man enough to tell us that you are not interested.

Well, I wish all the best, as we continue our search for a reliable person
that will be genuinely intersted in assisting us.

He actually called it. I got some of the other scammers to fax their documents to the fax number. One guy e-mailed me back and said that the lady on the line didn't know of any James Kirk there. Teehee...

Re:Great, more censorship

[Uma Thurman]

Nobody's stopping you from getting spam if you want it. Calling this censorship is completely and utterly misunderstanding what censorship is, and what a blocklist is.

Spam to spammers

[razmaspaz]

Do you think the people who send out all this spam get annoyed at all the spam in their mailbox or are they proud of the work they do?

Re:Spam to spammers

[scott1853]

If a Sprint telemarketer gets a call at home from an on-duty Sprint telemarketer, does he tell them to go fuck off? That's another one for the Zen Buddists to think about.

Re:Spam to spammers

[brassman]

I saw a spammer webforum once -- one of the members started spamming it, and all the rest were royally PO'ed about it. The irony was completely lost on them.

Hrm, isn't that John Gilmore's ISP?

[autopr0n]

IE the founder of the EEF and the guy who refuses to close is open mail relay?

Re:Hrm, isn't that John Gilmore's ISP?

[billstewart]

Actually, you've hit a major irony, because Verio refuses to continue selling John Gilmore internet access. John was one of the members of The Little Garden internet access co-op (back before ISPs were common), which was businessified, then bought by Best, which was bought by Verio, which was bought by NTT.

But they will sell to spammers.

Only the corporate site was blocked

[d2ksla]

but I'd rather see every spammer run rampant then restrict even one innocent party nobody cares about.

In the comment from Spamhaus it is clearly stated that only the Verio corporate mailserver is blocked in order to protect their ISP users.

Is that why spam in my Hotmail account has dropped

[dustpuppy]

Hmmm ... i don't know if it cooincidence, but the spam in my Hotmail account has significantly dropped off ... from 30 to 100 spam a day down to 10-20 max ...

Viro when did you lose your way?

[red5]

A while ago I worked for a now defunct dot-com that dealt in e-mail marketing through opt-ins. When we moved to hosting through verio. They threatened to cut us off even though our mailings were opt-in, and sent from a different (non-verio) location.

Their anti-spam policies were so draconian that we had to move to exodus. When did they become pro-spam?

Why content filtering is not enough

[Frater 219]

The technology is out there, in the form of Bayesian filters, and is nearly perfect.

Bayesian filters, SpamAssassin, and other client-side content filters can indeed reduce the amount of spam that you see. As such, they can reduce some major costs of spam for the average Internet user, small site, or business: costs such as annoyance, offense, wasted time, and harm to productivity thereby caused -- that is to say, the end-user costs of spam.

However, they have no effect on the cost of the bandwidth and other resource costs of spam, which are substantial for large ISPs and large businesses -- and for the Internet as a whole. In order to perform content filtration on a piece of mail, you must receive it and store it first, which has its costs. (Consider that large ISPs regularly report that anywhere from one-third to two-thirds of their mail is spam.)

Only forms of spam filtration which do not permit the spammer to send the spam to your mail server can reduce the bandwidth cost of spam. In practicality, that means filters which apply to one or more of the following (in increasing order of cost):

1. The sending host's IP address;
2. The sending host's DNS name or other IP metadata; or
3. The contents of the SMTP envelope, that is, the arguments to the MAIL FROM and RCPT TO commands, or other sender behavior prior to the DATA command.

(Note the SMTP envelope is not the same as the mail headers, which are part of the SMTP DATA. An SMTP server is permitted to reject mail before DATA, but is not allowed to drop the connection in mid-DATA. If you do not understand this, read RFC 2821.)

DNSBLs -- such as SBL, MAPS RBL, and SPEWS -- all apply to the IP address of the sending system. Domain-based rejection lists (which are not commonly published) apply to the DNS name of the sending system. RHSBLs, and relay checking, apply to the SMTP envelope.

Keep also in mind that one function of some (but not all) DNSBLs is not merely to filter out spam, but to discourage it from being attempted in the first place. By rejecting mail from networks which have proven themselves to tolerate spammers, we tell network operators that if they wish to be able to send us mail, they must kick off their spammers. It's their choice which they do; they just have to choose which is worth more to them: being able to send mail to sites that don't like spam, or being able to host network-abusers with impunity.

(Incidentally, you will find precious little sympathy for calling spam filtering "censorship". Censorship, as those who have experienced it understand, happens when some party uses violent force to stop a view or expression from being published by its advocates (at their cost). Spammers aren't trying to publish their views at their own cost and being violently restrained from doing so: they're trying to steal the use of others' equipment to publish their stuff.)

Re:Why content filtering is not enough

[CoolVibe]

Content filtering helps. The more users use content filtering, the less of the spammers' messages gets seen by the users, and it will make mass-mailed advertising scams profitless, and if that's successful, spam dies.

Sure, DNSBLs and other blacklists help. They should be used. The content filtering is just perfect for covering that last mile (if spam passes all the blacklisting mechanism). It _might_ deterr spammers from spamming, but I doubt it. Spammer notices that his last mailing bounced, and he uses another open relay.

If a spammer knows that Bayesian filters and Spamassassin/Razor type content filtering are widely deployed, it will act as a quite effective deterrant for sending spam. Maybe.

What really needs to be done is EDUCATE isps that an open relay can get you in a whole heap of trouble. Of course many have closed their relays, but a lot still have open ones. Especially administrators in the Middle East and Asia need to be LARTed badly, since that's where 90% of my spam is relayed from. Once all open relays are killed, the spammer has only 2 alternatives, either set up his own SMTP, or use the one his ISP allocated to him. Both are easy to track and put an end to. The spammer would have to register for a new account and the more often that happens, the sooner his/her name will be blacklisted. Heck, if anti-spam laws are legislated, the spammer could end up in jail. Jail is the ultimate deterrent. There's nothing like the prospect of being assraped by Bubba to deterr spammers.

With respect to the "filtering spam is censorship" comments, well... Content filtering is my way of plugging my ears with my fingers because I do not want to know what you are trying to sell me/scam me into. The DNSBLs are a LART to teach the admins not to run an open relay.

Re:Why content filtering is not enough

[Frater 219]

What really needs to be done is EDUCATE isps that an open relay can get you in a whole heap of trouble. Of course many have closed their relays, but a lot still have open ones.

"If we close the open relays, spam will go away" is actually what a lot of spamfighters thought five years ago. A common opinion then was that spam was basically a technical problem, like a security hole or smurfing, and that applying the appropriate technical fix to mail servers would prevent it.

Unfortunately, that hasn't worked. First off, open relays are not the only technical problem that makes spamming easier. Open proxies are just as common today -- and worse, since they hide the tracks of spammers. (They're also used by all sorts of other abusers.) Moreover, open proxies are harder to get people to close down, since blocking access from them to mail servers doesn't usually affect their legitimate users -- and thus doesn't draw their attention.

Second, it has been increasingly realized by most spamfighters that spam is a social problem, not merely a technical one. The problem isn't just that there are abusable resources, but that there are people who are willing to abuse them for profit, and other people who are willing to aid and abet those abusers in order to reap a share of that profit.

As a parallel, consider burglary. Sure, it is good to employ technical means such as deadbolt locks and alarms to block or deter burglars -- but nobody thinks that burglaries are solely technical problems, and that we should pursue only better locks rather than the arrest of burglars. Burglary is a social problem; specifically, a problem caused by some people's willingness to violate others' rights. We call those kind of problems "crimes".

Spam is a particularly frustrating crime since anyone who considers the proprieties of the situation can recognize it as lawless, but few legislatures have chosen to formalize its criminality in statute. It's lawless because it defies the property rights of mail server owners, alienating their resources for the spammer's use without permission. That's often covered by statutes regarding theft of service, computer crimes, or various sorts of tort, and there have been a number of cases wherein spamming was recognized by judges and juries as such. However, in many jurisdictions there's no statute to point to that says "spamming is a crime".

Third, there's also an social-technical problem. There's a small number of crooks who can profit themselves greatly by finding means of sending spam. Each of them has a much greater incentive to locate these means than any individual spamfighter does. This is a social problem in a different sense: insofar as spamfighting relies on discovering paths for spam propagation and getting them shut down (e.g. closing open relays) the crooks are always going to be several steps ahead.

By targeting organizations and persons known to be sources of spam, rather than the victims they exploit to send that spam, we can get around that problem. The number of large-scale spammers is actually rather few. Steve Linford's ROKSO (Registry Of Known Spam Operations; same guy as the SBL) lists around 100 organizations which have been thrown off of ISPs three or more times for spamming.

Fundamentally, I agree with you that the problem is one of education. However, it is not merely the education of ISP technical staff that must take place. It's the education of everyone involved -- technical staff, their managers, mail software authors, spammers, the legal system, spam recipients, and businesses that might consider spamming. Everyone needs to wise up about spam.

There ought to be a law...

[cperciva]

We really need a law which requires Internet service providers to publicly disclose their terms of service -- that is, publicly disclose what terms of service they actually enforce.

After all, it's really just a consumer protection issue: Verio claims to have an active abuse department, and is thereby misleading people who assume that spammers on Verio's network will be shut down.

Re:Good

[Frater 219]

I would not be suprised to see Spamhaus served a cease-and-desist before Verio does the Right Thing and starts punting luser spammers.

Luckily, the spamfighting community has a great deal of experience with such misbehavior. The slang expression among spamfighters for a sender of baseless legal threats is "cartooney", as in cartoon + attorney. Spammers send these out by the boatloads when their delusions suggest it will get people to stop trying to block their thefts.

Steve Linford, the operator of the SBL and ROKSO (and known in China as Stiff Linefeed) is a long-time anti-spam veteran, and has a great deal of support from others such. If Verio tries to harangue, hassle, or hornswoggle him into falsely removing them from SBL, he will have dozens of clued and supportive people on his side. If Verio files suit, Mr. Linford will have a substantial legal defense fund faster than you can say "Canter & Siegel".

Re:Great, more censorship

[p3d0]

That's only half the picture. It also must let every non-spam email get through. It can't just discard important emails. Otherwise, I could provide you with a simple filter that blocks 100% of spam...

(I'd like to point out that the link you provided claimed "0 false positives" which is exactly what I'm talking about.)

Spammers

[Ninja Master Gara]

I've had to shut down two mail accounts because of the enormous volume of spam they get. Enough to make even using spam filters a bandwidth problem on my dial up. They were unfortunate enough to be linked with mailto: on a medium traffic site before the harvesting craze began and within a couple weeks were effectively unusable.

ISPs need to realise that if they're not going to do anything about it, they'll be blocked. This happened to us years ago when the ORDB started, and we fixed the problem immediately. We didn't think they were being nasty to us, we realised we had a problem, and we set about fixing it. When ISPs get globally klined from IRC networks, their customers want to know why, and put pressure on the ISP. They listen and respond.

This is no different. If yer gonna be a spammy host, prepare to be blacklisted. Reponsible, rigid, no nonsense, targetted policies are the only thing that will have ANY effect, and even they won't STOP all spam. But it sure helps.

Re:Good

[Frater 219]

The goal of most spam blockers is to eliminate commercial use of the Internet.

Actually, most "spam blockers" work for organizations which commercially use the Internet. They are mail administrators for ISPs or other companies, which have directed them to reduce the impact of spam on their businesses -- to cut costs or to improve service to customers.

Spam isn't commercial use. It's criminal use.

Re:Good

[Frater 219]

You define commercial use as providing services for not-for-profit indivduals web surfing. Fine.

No, I don't. I define it as the use of the Internet for commerce, which is to say economic activity between consenting traders and investors -- what my left-wing friends would call "capitalism". I don't consider your sending of unsolicited advertisements to "an unconfirmed email address" (how many was it really?) to be commerce. I consider it to be spamming.

I define commercial use as trying to sell a product on the Internet and communicate with customers. You send one single email to an unconfirmed email address and you can be blocked for days. Do that enough and you are out of business.

You admit sending commercial email to an unconfirmed email address (how many addresses?), which turned out to belong to someone who had not solicited your message. By the usual definition of spamming as "unsolicited commercial email", that means that you admit to having spammed.

The techniques for operating confirmed mailing lists are not new. Mailing list software to operate confirmed lists has existed since well before the "e-commerce" boom. Thousands of businesses use such software. They operate confirmed, solicited commercial mailing lists ... and they don't get listed as spammers.

It sounds to me, from your description of the situation, like you failed to do due diligence, failed to take advantage of the information resources available to you -- and as a result, you spammed. In that case, the folks who listed you as a source of spam were telling the truth, weren't they?

Don't bother saying it doesn't work that way - we just got unblocked from that happening.

Hey, I'm just working with what you give me. If you'd like to point to a published record of your exchange with the list operators, please do so. A Google search link into NANAE, if that's where the exchange took place, would be more than adequate.

How many addresses did you spam, again?

100 million mailboxes protected?

[realdpk]

I find that figure *very* hard to believe. How do they figure it's 100M?

Here's hoping this group is more responsible than SPEWS. With that (likely bogus) figure being announced, I doubt that they are.

Re:Great, more censorship

[kgasso]

Exactly. We get users bitching and moaning about spam, and what are we going to do -- ignore them and let them take their business elsewhere? We are taking the route of designing a crap filter the users can configure, and select which BL's to use -- all based around procmail and SpamAssassin. User doesn't want any filtering? Okay, easy enough for them to disable it completely.

I don't want to sound like a callous jerk, but it doesn't sound like the original poster knows what it's like having thousands of users screaming for some sort of server-side spam filtering. For their $18 or whatever a month, the majority of them want their ISP to do something about the viagra/pr0n/MMF spam in their mailbox. ISP's just need to make the right decision in letting the users decide if they want filtering or not. Users can always go elsewhere if the ISP wants to enforce filters the user doesn't like.

My $.02 USD.

Re:This is depressing...

[Ilgaz]

I don't believe a single word of you. Your URL, which is some sort of affilate ID makes me think different stuff than the thing you said.

What is "your site", if its "your site", you are CEO of Reozone.com? If thats true, do you affilate with them?

Let me tell the real story. You had some sort of an innocent mailing list, than you sent that reozone.com URL with your affilate link to them.

Oh blocking Yahoo.com? gmx.de blocks them, Novell Myrealbox blocks their mailing list service because of non-serious abuse policy (even they are a potential huge customer). Also, when a yahoo mail user spams you, I have a record like, 2 hours later his account has been deleted.

SO EVERYONE CLICKS ON YOUR REFERER ID'ED URL ON SLASHDOT GIVES YOU MONEY?

bleh

Re:Good

[odaiwai]

The goal of the blockers is to eliminate commercial use of the Internet.

This is absolutely untrue. The goal of the blockers is to stop spam and abuse of the network and reclaim it from those who think that merely having and email address is an invitation to get spam.

dave

Obligatory pitch

[pongo000]

TMDA offers those who want it the ability to filter e-mail through a confirmation process (or, you can generate "keyword" or "dated" addresses for temporary use in newsgroups and other high-harvester areas). My spam went from several tens of spam messages a day to zero after spending a couple of hours with TMDA.

This solution doesn't do anything about bandwidth (since you will still get the same amount of spam traffic at your mail port), but it's a fuzzy-warm feeling to be in control of your own mailbox for once.

Re:A temporary fix

[LostCluster]

What this is designed to do is to make an example out of Verio. If an ISP hurting to make reveune targets agrees to look the other way towards spammers, that ISP will find itself in the black hole, and end up losing legit customers (whether they walk away in protest after hearing of the RBL, or simply because they think Verio's too clueless to get their e-mail to work) which negates the spammer income and then some.

Yeah, it's cat-and-mouse, but eventually the mouse will run out of places to hide. There are a finite number of backbone providers in this world.

Re:Good

[Jay L]

You send one single email to an unconfirmed email address

Actually, having just tried a demo of CD-R Diagnostic (an excellent program, btw), I'd like to point out that you send FOUR. Two in quick succession when the demo is downloaded, one three days later, and one five days after that.

The last e-mail says that you delete all evaluation e-mail addresses after 14 days, but the others give no indication of when it will end, there are no remove instructions, there is no explanation of how you got my address, etc. If I got this because someone typed in my e-mail address, I'd probably report you too. You should read up on the Ten Rules for Permission-Based Marketing.

About theft of service

[coolgeek]

I'll probably get tagged as a troll for this one, but...

I support and believe the position that spammers or other unauthorized users of a system that I own are stealing services from me. I further believe it is OK to block their traffic from crossing my equipment.

Now, let's look at this from the telemarketing perspective...My phone at home is one of those models that has a wall wart. I believe when the phone rings, or is in use, it draws more current. So, when a telemarketer makes an unsolicited (and unauthorized) call to my phone, does that mean they're stealing my electricity? What about my most valuable resource, my time? Are they stealing my time?

I hate spam just as much as the next guy. And I don't believe ignoring people who cause a nuisance infringes their right to free speech. I do however believe the "telemarketing" lens will be used by the Judicial System when examining these issues. Sooner or later, these spammers will mount a constitutional challenge to anti-spam legislation. Well, if they are making that much money, anyway. They may not even need the money for such a battle, it seems the EFF just might take up their cause.

One solution for spam in your inbox

[PhantomHarlock]

Ok, here's one way to eliminate spam in your inbox. No, this doesn't eliminate the cause, only the symptom, but it will stop the bandwidth at your server if you so have the power.

This works best if you own your own domain name and can create multiple pop boxes. It's still doable using regular email accounts, however.

Step 1: Change your email address to a previously unused address at your domain. Test it for a day, verify no spam is coming in to that address.

Step 2: Email all your trusted friends, relatives and business contacts your new email address.

Step 3: Remove your old email address links from your website and replace them with a feedback form that emails an unrevealed throwaway secondary address using your favorite web -> email gateway scripts.

Step 4: Create a bounce message at your old address, with a link to the feedback form, for all the people you forgot to email about your new address, and for people who want to contact you through your old address as they have found it on google searches or other archived postings, or your old business cards, etc.

Step 5: Receive both the new email address and the feedback form submissions on to your local mail reader. Filter them in to seperate directories. Give out your real, private address to feedback form users once they've verified themselves as being legit. If not, have a throwaway identity you can talk to them through. (the email account that the feedback form mails to) If you start getting spam at that address, simply change it.

Step 6: When you make public postings, post the feedback form URL instead of your email address. When you have to give your address away to commercial websites to sign up or download things, give them the throwaway address, or create a third address for legitimate online companies and filter that into a third folder for "commercial website email" If that get compromised by an unscrupulous business, change it. Still doesn't affect your primary private address.

You can receive the two or three addresses all at once with any modern mail reader, and filter them into folders. I personally use Eudora.

This is a really easy thing to do if you can stand changing your email address. I've had the same address since 1995, so I get about 150 spams per day. I have a filter that gets rid of most of those, but that's local and I still take the bandwidth hit, and about 20% of them get to my inbox still. Rather than try to over-filter and get a false positive, I think the above solution is a worry free and clean way to make a break from spam.

---Mike

Re:Breaking things is not fixing the problem.

[Skapare]

What if the someone that wants to talk to you just wants to sell your something? Or what if they want to convice you to change your opinion about something. Or what if they want to just reply to your Slashdot posting privately? How are you going to tell these apart?

The problem with spam isn't really the message. If I were to get in my mail box precisely and exactly the information I was interested in, I wouldn't have any problem with it. Maybe I would be interested in visiting just the right kind of porn site. Maybe I really would like to enlarge my penis. Maybe my printer really has run out of ink. Maybe. Maybe NOT.

But this is a hard thing to work out when you are dealing with content. For example, I often post on mailing lists or USENET and for many, I do get private replies (and spam, too). It's reasonable to assume that if you post, you've invited a reply (unless you say otherwise). But a "reply" to a posting about what I think should be in the next version of some standard should not be asking me if I need more golf balls. That's just plain off topic. Still, I have gotten replies that are completely ON topic, yet are sent by someone that is a total moron and not worth reading and a total waste of my time.

The real problem with spam isn't the content at all. The real problem is the way it is delivered, and the way it is determined to whom it is delivered.

TV commercials, radio spots, newspaper ads, and web banners, are what I call gatewayed advertising. What that means is that someone (the TV station sales department, the newspaper advertising department, or CmdrTaco while trying to get more revenues for Slashdot to keep it alive and pay for the kind of bandwidth that would create a Slashdot Effect on most web servers) is the "gateway" into the media where the advertising is presented. You don't get to put a TV commercial on without paying the TV station for the time. As much as I dislike most commercials (some I do enjoy the first time around), I also know they pay for, or in some cases at least help pay for, what I am receiving. But the whole point is, it's not going to get out of control because there is someone acting as the gateway. TV stations know they will lose viewers if there is 50 minutes of commercials every hour. CmdrTaco knows it would ruin Slashdot if every page were plastered with dozens of banner and box ads totally obscuring the content. And even if they did do the wrong thing and ruin it, I can change the channel or go to another site. There isn't a scaling issue here for these media.

But with spam, you can't change the channel. You can't choose to visit another site. And worst of all, it's not paying for a damned thing you receive.

We can make a comparison of spam with telemarketing and fax ads. Neither of these really pay for anything you receive. While it may be argued that telemarketers keep the cost of phone service down by providing more revenue for the phone company, this isn't really true. Most telemarketing actually takes place at the peak times that phone networks are busy, so the phone companies just have to scale up to that level of business. They aren't getting new revenues, and you can be damned sure that telemarketers are not paying an extra premium to the phone companies to help lower your phone bill (there are plenty of scumbags in that industry that would find ways around that).

Another comparison is with ads you get in snail mail. It doesn't really pay for anything you receive (they get huge discounts from the Postal Service for bulk packaging them so the delivery guy doesn't even have to check the addresses). But while these are annoying and a bit of a problem, it's not something that's going to grow exponentially from here because there is a "gateway" of cost. Those leaflets you get on your windshield are much the same. It's a pain to have to reach over and grab it and throw it away, and again, it hasn't paid for anything you receive. But like bulk snail mail, there is cost and someone has to roam around sticking them on.

The problem with spam isn't the content, it's that so much can be delivered so fast and to so many people that there is in effect NO GATEWAY to this. And as bandwidth gets cheaper and cheaper, and servers get faster and faster, you and your delete key will have to just work harder and harder to keep up. No wonder people are working on automating things to delete spam. And it just escalates.

So yeah, we do need to be able to continue to communicate, and this also needs to include advertising where appropriate. But there needs to be some kind of "gateway" to control it, to make sure it doesn't get out of hand, and to make sure the decisions about how much to send and to whom to send are decided on properly. And this also includes making sure it is sent to the proper email address for those of us with many (if you own a domain and have set it up so that any name on the left of the at sign works, raise your hand).

There will always be those who think it is their right to communicate with everyone. But, yet again, the issue is not about the message, but instead is about the methodology. Email is not a broadcast medium and should not be treated as such. It is a one to one communication medium. And I translate that to being a person to person communication medium. So if you want to communicate with me, you need to at least be a person, and not a machine running some spamware. Maybe SMTP needs a rethought. Or maybe not. I've thought about it and don't really have any answers (yet). But I do think the ultimate solution is going to end up having to be something that proves that it is a person who communicates with me, and gives me as much of their time in sending me the message as it takes from me to read it or listen to it. We need to find some way to communicate that does not allow the sender to automate it without that message being tagged as automated. That is the real problem with spam ... it's so impersonal ... it's all automated.

Re:Is that why spam in my Hotmail account has drop

[Matts]

Hotmail just started using Brightmail, hence the drop in spam. It's nothing to do with blocklists or Verio.

Some corrections and arguments.

[fmaxwell]

We were blocked (wrongly) a while back by some cowboy with a list.

No you were not. As you yourself later point out, people who compile lists don't block anyone.

Practically everyone listed claims that they were "wrongly" listed (and maybe you were). And you will find an astonishing number of "innocent" people in jail if you do a survey of the incarcerated. I have heard proclamations of innocence from multiple people running open relays and from those who claim to have purchased "opt-in" lists of e-mail addresses. In many other cases, these "wrongful" accusations are because some firm had a registration form with some tiny checkbox hidden below the bottom of the screen that, by default, gave them and/or their "business partners" permission to spam. Frankly, if a company tries to deceive its customers that way, then they deserve to be blocked.

The goal of the blockers is to eliminate commercial use of the Internet.

Spoken like a true spammer*. The goal of the blockers is to eliminate theft of bandwidth, storage, and time via spam. They want to make spam unprofitable both for those who send it and those who enable them. In short, they want to stop people from being bombarded with unwanted bulk e-mail delivered at the recipient's expense. What you said is analogous to saying that the goal of store security is to eliminate commercial transactions in stores.

I have a domain on which I employ aggressive anti-spam filtering, based on IP addresses, addressee, content, and header criteria. In the last couple of weeks, I have received commercial e-mail directly related to purchases from Gateway, TigerDirect, MCM Electronics, HP, and Directron. I do a lot of business on the net and rely on e-mail for everything from order confirmations to customer service inquiries. So please don't tell me that my goal is "to eliminate commercial use of the Internet."

We have to move away from relying on an unreliable communication media (email) just to stay in any form of business at all.

All of the firms that I mentioned above rely on e-mail. Dell never seems to get blacklisted. Neither does HP, Directron, Amazon.com, ebay, General Motors, etc. Just what was your firm doing with e-mail? Were you using it to send advertising? If so, how did you compile the list of recipients? Was it from a link that said 'click here to get our advertisements' or was it via some registration form that purported to be for some other purpose (e.g., order placement, tracking, customer survey, contest, etc.)? I just have trouble believing that some blacklist maintainer blocked you because you sent an order confirmation to someone.

* Note that I said "like" -- I'm not accusing you of anything

Re:Good

[Isofarro]

Spam blocking makes email unreliable.

No. Email has _never_ been completely reliable. There is nothing in the RFCs that guarantee delivery of every email.

Spam on the other hand, makes email _more_ unreliable because of the unwanted volume of it. Spam blocking is a means of reducing that volume.

The goal of most spam blockers is to eliminate commercial use of the Internet.

No. Consensual commercial email usage is preferred. Unsolicited and unwanted email in volume is what we seek to eliminate.

We got unblocked yesterday.

Funny how you need your services blocked before you actually take responsibility for your mail server. Now had you been a competant and responsible administrator, you probably wouldn't have been on a block list in the first place.

HE.net included? Surprised!

[markwelch]

I was also surprised to see he.net included in a blocklist. I hosted with them for a year (until moving my server home to my DSL connection due to budget constraints) because they have consistently had one of the strongest anti-spam responses, dating back to the "Joes.com/Yuri Rutman/thinning hair/el cheepo" forged-spam attack.

I do know that one of their employees handling spam complaints did give me a reason to pause once -- she initially accepted a spammer's response, but that action was reversed as soon as I challenged it, and the customer was terminated, and I was sent an apology making clear that this was a mistake, not a new spam-tolerant policy at the company. Later complaints were promptly and properly handled.

I believe that at least three he.net customers were terminated in the past year due to complaints I submitted. (And I was a lowly $200-per-month colo customer, and at least one of the terminated customers was much bigger.)

If he.net is leaving the door open to spam-cartels, despite warnings, then of course they should be blacklisted. I just find that harder to believe. In contrast, my experience has been than Verio is extremely spam-tolerant, even balking at terminating Spamford Wallace (they finally relented and cut him off, which resulted in his filing a frivolous lawsuit against me, costing me $5,000 to get the suit dismissed). All my more recent spam complaints to Verio have gone unanswered, and I know I have several Verio IP blocks already on my filter list, though I haven't blocked all their IP addresses.