For those not aware, spam is junk email. And like our mailboxes at home are stuffed with junk mail, our computer email boxes are stuffed as well. Currently, I average about 120 spam messages per day. And it does take time away from my work to sort through and delete the junk mail while still keeping the real mail. Spam is a definite problem and we need a way to fight it. But what these people do is no solution.

There are several terrorists who have gone off the deep end and started sites like SpamCop, SPEWS, OsiruSoft, FiveTenSRC, and SpamBag (to name a few). Most of these are run by one individual who chooses to play god on the net.

Let me first explain a little about how the net works. Each computer, server, and router on the net has to have an IP address. This is a string of four numbers separated with a period and each number can be 0 through 255. For instance, my primary server (Anastasia) is 64.46.100.62. Then there are netblocks made up of huge spans of these IP addresses. For instance, the IP I listed above is in the netblock 64.46.96.0 - 64.46.127.255.

Each and every piece of email that is sent has "headers" attached. These headers identify where the email originated and each server or node that it passed through. So, each email that I send or that any of my clients send has an origination of 64.46.100.62. It should also be mentioned that spammers are increasingly spoofing these headers to make it look like the email is coming from someplace that it is not.

What the anti-spam terrorists do, is create a blacklist of server IP addresses that have been known to spam or are known to make life easy for spammers. Then they make these blacklists available for others to use as well. All mail going into these servers is checked against the blacklist and if a match is found, that message is bounced back to the sender.

So what's the problem? Well, all of my clients mail goes out through the same IP (64.46.100.62). So, if I happen to have a spammer (which has happened) and those spam messages get reported to one of these anti-spam terrorists, they will blacklist 64.46.100.62 even though I found and got rid of the spammer within an hour (which was the case). Now, until these terrorists decide otherwise, my client Nancy, who had no idea of any of this happening, can't send email to her cousin because her cousin's ISP is foolishly using one of these terrorist-written blacklists.

But wait, it gets worse! Sometimes the anti-spam terrorists will block the ENTIRE netblock. This is what is happening to me now. There happened to be spammers on 4 different servers in my data center at the same time. So, these terrorists have decided that my data center must be friendly to spammers and they have blacklisted us all. Now, because of something that I was totally unaware of and that my clients have nothing to do with, we can't send email to some of our friends, family, and loved ones. How does that make sense? What kind of way to fight spam is this? Apparently, it is the Anti-Spam Terrorist way of doing things.

A more conventional way to put this would be in this example. Imagine if the U.S. Post Office in Wellington, Ohio stopped accepting all mail coming from New Jersey because there was so much junk mail coming from there. They would just gather it all up, mark it as "Rejected: From Junk Mail State", and send it back to where it came from. Now, Aunt Sally from New Jersey can't send me my birthday card this year because New Jersey permits its corporations to send too much junk mail. Does that seem fair? It's the SAME THING!

So what do the terrorists say? Well, here is the response SPEWS gives when you ask why you are listed and how to get delisted: "Sorry, SPEWS is a list of known spammers, spamming operations and spam supporters, if you fit the criteria there's a good chance you will be listed and stay listed. If you are a spammer, may we suggest you get a real job?"

Like I said at the beginning, I hate spam! But using this terrorist-like method of identifying and preventing spam is even worse than the spammers themselves.

05-10-2003

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