RE: Offtopic: Viruses & Spam

dgoulet_at_vicr.com wrote:
> Alright, don't flame me for being off topic like this. But some months
ago
> someone harvested the old mailing list and I for one started getting a LOT
of
> spam messages, things like how to fleece the airlines into providing cheap
> seats. etc... You know that "too good to be true" stuff that comes with a
price
> tag. Well like many I was upset (to put it mildly) and decided that just
> deleting it was not good enough. Therefore I started sending the messages
back
> to 'abuse@<mail system>' for all of the hosts defined in the message.
Since I
> started that, I've been happily receiving messages like the attached and
the
> amount of SPAM has dropped dramatically. Therefore, some of you out there
may
> want to do likewise.

I would caution you and others that *carelessly* sending mail to abuse@ can cause you problems as well. First of all, a disclaimer: I am about as anti-spam as they come. ;-) That being said, please be careful about using abuse@ mailboxes.

You should ONLY E-mail abuse@ addresses when you can clearly show where the spam originated. If you don't, you risk finding that the site you just E-mailed has shut off access to other lists that you (or others) may have legitmately wanted. This actually happens quite frequently. Here's a recent illustration:

When Jared first posted the "this is a test" message to this new list, if you'll remember, it set off a flurry of "I got it" type responses. Several people didn't bother to read that the list was moving, and instead only saw what APPEARED to be a bunch of spam. If they had read Jared's postings in the old list that the change-over was imminent, they probably wouldn't have freaked. But since they didn't, several of them wrote to their ISP, at the abuse@ address, and said that they were getting spam.

ISP's get that kind of mail ALL the time. They don't have time to figure out if it's legit or not, and the vast majority of the time they just block the offending address. It's faster than tracking down the truth, and when you've got 250 E-mail's backlogged for similar complaints, believe me, it's simply easier to just block the address without question. I don't blame the ISP: they have enough to worry about. I blame the original sender who didn't read the messages, but don't get me started about that. ;-)

In this particular case, the complaintant was a GTE.net customer. GTE.net promptly put a block in place for ALL mail originating out of fatcity.com. The guy who complained was now happy, because he wasn't seeing any more "spam", but that meant that 17 other subscribers to lists here at fatcity.com suddenly stopped receiving messages. They complained to me, but since the block was on the GTE.net side, there was/is nothing I can do. I can only tell those 17 people what happened and ask them to write the system admins at GTE and ask them to remove the block.

The careless "anger" or knee-jerk reaction by this one individual WRONGLY resulted in 17 other people not being able to get their list traffic. This kind of thing happens to us (fatcity.com) on a weekly basis. Believe me, I spend almost as much time getting us OFF of blacklists as I do handling spam complaints!

It's taken WEEKS to work this out with GTE.net, but we appear to have finally resolved it. It takes a lot of groveling on my part, begging and pleading, PROMISING them that I'm not a spammer, to get those subscribers back to their traffic. It helps that I'm registered with COACE (an anti-spam organization), but some sites won't budge. Their policy is that you're spam, no matter how much you say otherwise. Oracle, believe it or not, is one of these sites. GTE, by the way, earns my HUGE respect for being willing to work this out and resolve it. Oracle, by comparison, will NOT work this out, and I've literally been threatened with legal sanctions because of careless messages to their abuse@ address.

Unfortunately I don't see any happy medium in the near future. Spam is a MAJOR source of frustration for everyone, not just the end users. I'm hoping that through education of the issues, people will come to deal with it responsibly. Hopefully this message will help in that regard. Received on Fri May 05 2000 - 13:31:37 CDT