Comteck News - Avoiding SPAM

SPAM Dos and Don'ts
Indiana's DECEPTIVE COMMERCIAL ELECTRONIC MAIL Law, enacted 4/17/2003

SPAM
Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail. Junk E-Mail. We all get it whether we like it or not. Can we stop it? No. Can we slow it down? Yes. Hopefully we can give you a few pointers that, if used, will reduce the amount of SPAM you get.
   UCE/SPAM is sent out using the age old philosophy of business, you want to sell more, contact more. Off they go, sending thousands and thousands. SPAMMERS typically start off by purchasing a mailing list of E-Mail addresses, or a bulk mailing program that includes lists. Prices vary, lists vary. Once you get on a list, it's real hard to get back off (regardless of what they say).
   Where does it come from? The majority of SPAM originates from a "disposable" dialup accounts from one of the National ISPs being "relayed" through a mail server, typically overseas, in an attempt to hide their real location. Their Internet accounts are disposable because soon as their ISP finds out what they are doing, they cancel their account. The SPAMMER knows this and they just go get another account, another E-Mail address, and continue.
   How did you get on the list in the first place? You might have posted your E-Mail address to the Newsgroups, you have a web page with your E-Mail address listed on it, you signed someone' s guestbook and posted your E-Mail address, you provided your E-Mail address on a registration, Mailing List, etc and it was sold. Any time you publish your E-Mail address on the Internet SPAMMERS have ways to filter out addresses.
  You're getting a lot of SPAM now, how do you make it stop? Short of changing your E-Mail address, you can't. You can possibly reduce it by E-Mailing a copy to their "upsteam provider" or ISP voicing your opinion of what they should do. Most ISPs are quick to act upon SPAM complaints by canceling their account.
  Why do we even care? Unlike postal mail, where the sender absorbs the bulk of the costs (they have to pay the cost of stamps, paper, printing, etc), with SPAM, the bulk of the cost is passed on to the receiver. You have to pay for your Internet account, they are eating up your ISP's bandwidth, it's your valuable time lost sifting through your E-Mail only to find it to be electronic junk mail (some ISPs have limits/quotas on e-mail with additional charges for increased email or legitimate email might be rejected because your mailbox is full due to SPAM E-Mail), and some contain very objectionable content.

What are we doing about it?

Comteck maintains several Mailboxes of commonly used usernames to catch SPAMMERS using username 'dictionaries' and spamtraps for SPAMMERs harvesting web pages for E-Mail addresses. The E-mail addresses are never used and if they get E-Mail, it's always SPAM. They get SPAMMED, the SPAMMER, ISP, or IPs gets blocked. As of July 2002, we have now incorporated the RBL (Real-Time-Blackhole Lists) from ORDB and SPAMHAUS. We'll never stop them all unless legislation is passed at the Federal level, but we at least dented it.
A few note-worthy recent events ... Europe bans SPAM and The State of New York sues MonsterHut (for the I didn't opt-in-but they claim I did-and now I can't opt-out SPAM as described in the next paragraph).

9-26-02

free service
Comteck's Mail Guardian is the solution to controlling unwanted E-Mail. You can filter unwanted E-Mail easily. With 2 methods available, Manual or Automatic, it will provide you with the tools needed to ensure the mail you don't want, and didn't ask for, doesn't make it to your mailbox. Mail Guardian provides you with a web-based, user-friendly interface, with plenty of online Help so you can get your Mail Guardian up and running in minutes. Because Mail Guardian access is password protected (to prevent someone from modifying your Mail Guardian properties) we require registration before using it. First time users need visit Mail Guardian Registration

The Opt-In can't Opt-Out mailing lists
  The new trend in SPAM. I recently signed up at freet-shirts.com thinking I would get this cool t-shirt. During the registration, I was asked to select if I wanted to receive occational offers from their affiliates. I DID NOT select any. The SPAM immediately started pouring in with as many as 20-30 per day for everything from cell-phones, free-software, insurance... you name it. At this point I am pretty frustrated. All of them claimed they received my name as a result of my request from their 'affiliate'. I knew where they got my name and E-mail address from. OK .. now .. I am on all these lists, against my better judgement, I go ahead an try to unsubscribe, per their instructions. Here's the trick, you can't! They either lead you to a web page, when you conveniently get an error trying to un-subscribe, or you e-mail them and the E-mail is rejected by their server. Reviewing the server log files, we found hundreds of E-Mails being rejected by their servers from Comteck customers trying to un-subscribe. The worst are edirectnetwork.net, networkpromotion.com and hispeedoffers.com. hispeedoffers.com is even more clever, they operate under many different names, all the same, hi-speedoffers, wowdeals, kooldeals, yesdeals, quickydeals, reallycooloffers, to name a few. Each one being the same place, each one you have to unsubscribe from, and all being rejected. View the server log. All this and I never even got my t-shirt :)

What Can You DO?
   First and foremost, DO NOT REPLY to the E-Mail. A lot of the SPAM received lists an E-Mail address that you can E-Mail to be removed. DON'T. Odds are, even if it is a valid address, that you not only WILL NOT get removed, you'll get more. All you really succeeded in doing is verifying that your address is valid, and you actually read your E-Mail. Your E-Mail address has been verified, is more valuable, and now brings a higher price.
  DO NOT publish your E-Mail address anywhere you are not sure what's going to happen to it. Most reputable sites are publishing "Privacy Policy" that tells you what they will do with the information they collected.
  If you must post your E-Mail address, mix it up a little so that an automated program searching for E-Mail addresses gets an invalid address while an individual, reading the address, knows how to modify it to make it good. An example used primarily with newsgroups is to add "remove" in your E-Mail address (i.e. instead of bob@dsaljfsdfh.com, you would post your address as bob@remove.dsaljfsdfh.com).
  We have begun to aggressively block sites that allow "relaying". Organizations such as ORBS (Open Relay Behavior-modification System) and RTBHL (Real Time BlackHole List) monitor reported mailservers to ensure compliance to the Relay rules, publish and block them. While blocking incoming E-Mail from the addresses, it also prevents you from E-Mailing them (normally to be removed from the list). If you try to E-Mail an address to be removed from a SPAM list, and you receive the error similiar to "550 SMTP Access Denied - SPAM" we already have them blocked, and we probably just did you a favor by preventing you from validating your E-Mail address.
Additional Resourses
Yahoo! News, SPAM and Junk E-Mail
Abuse.net's Fight SPAM
Anti-SPAM Home Page
Elsop's Anti-SPAM Page
UCLA's How to Complain About SPAM
Internet Abuse FAQs
SPAM Free Washington
Coalition Against UCE