Spam - re: quality of life on the Internet
nonprofit group helps you defeat it, for free

Dec. 2003

Anyone who uses the Internet knows the bane of our existence is the seemingly constant and unstoppable stream of unwanted emails to our in-box ... spam.

Did you know that 90% of spam received by Internet users in North America and Europe is sent by a hard-core group of under 200 spam outfits?

These known, professional, chronic spammers, many with criminal records for theft and fraud, are loosely grouped into gangs ("spam gangs") and move from network to network seeking out Internet Service Providers ("ISPs") with poor spam control and taking advantage of the slowness of some service providers to terminate them.

But there's a nonprofit worldwide group, The Spamhaus Project (Spamhaus.org), dedicated to defeating them.

The Spamhaus Block List ("SBL") can be used by almost all modern mail servers, by setting your mail server's anti-spam DNSBL feature (sometimes called "Blacklist DNS Servers" or "RBL servers") to query sbl.spamhaus.org.

Use of the SBL is free.

Spamhaus tracks the Internet's worst Spammers, known Spam Gangs and Spam Services, provides realtime anti-spam protection for Internet networks, and works with Law Enforcement Agencies to identify and pursue spammers worldwide.

Spamhaus Block List listings are immediate and, in the case of known spam gangs, are preemptive.

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The Definition of Spam

The word "Spam" as applied to Email means Unsolicited Bulk Email ("UBE").

Unsolicited means that the Recipient has not granted verifiable permission for the message to be sent. Bulk means that the message is sent as part of a larger collection of messages, all having substantively identical content.

This distinction is important because the Direct Marketing Association, the pro-junk group who lobby on behalf of the junk email industry, try to dupe politicians into thinking anti-spam organizations want "Unsolicited Email" banned, in order to dupe politicians into voting against anti-spam laws.

Technical Definition of "Spam"

An electronic message is "spam" IF: (1) the recipient's personal identity and context are irrelevant because the message is equally applicable to many other potential recipients; AND (2) the recipient has not verifiably granted deliberate, explicit, and still-revocable permission for it to be sent; AND (3) the transmission and reception of the message appears to the recipient to give a disproportionate benefit to the sender.

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Among other things, Spamhaus tracks news about spam and anti-spam legislation. Here's an article about what American Internet users can soon anticipate having to do to defeat spam in the U.S.:

United States set to Legalize Spamming on January 1, 2004
http://www.spamhaus.org/

Against the advice of all anti-spam organizations, the U.S. House of Representatives has passed the CAN-SPAM Act, a bill backed overwhelmingly by spammers and dubbed the "YOU-CAN-SPAM" Act because it legalizes spamming instead of banning it. Spam King Alan Ralsky told reporters the passage of the House bill "made my day". Spammers say they will now pour money into installations of new spam servers to heavily ramp up their outgoing spam volumes "all legally".

CAN-SPAM is expected to pass the Senate next week and be signed into law by President Bush on January 1, just in time to kill off California's strong anti-spam law which would have come into effect on January 1 making spamming illegal in California. With the passage of CAN-SPAM, spamming will be officially legal throughout the United States, CAN-SPAM says that 23 million US businesses can all begin spamming all US email addresses as long as they give users a way to opt-out, which users can do by following the instructions of each spammer. Anyone with any sense would of course realize that if CAN-SPAM becomes law, opting out of spammers lists will very likely become the main daytime activity for most US email users in 2004. The second main activity will be sorting through mailboxes crammed with 'legal' spam every few minutes to see if there's any email amongst the spam.

If CAN-SPAM becomes law, from January Europe and the United States will have opposing legislation, as Europe has already introduced legislation making spamming illegal. But 90% of Europe's spam problem originates in the United States where spamming will now be legal, therefore Europe can expect the levels of incoming spam from the United States to more than double during 2004 as US spammers ramp up their output under America's new YOU-CAN-SPAM law.

What this will do for relations between Europe and the United States, is easy to predict with millions of European Internet users already angry at being deluged in American "make-penis-fast" spam. From December 11, spamming will be illegal in the UK, but with 90% of the UK's spam problem originating in the United States, British users will continue to be flooded, now with 'legal' spam from the US

Some spammers are claiming that CAN-SPAM not only allows them to spam legally but that it protects them further by also making it illegal for anti-spam systems to block their spam. In fact, while CAN-SPAM is an abysmally poor law, at least it does have some parts which attempt to address the issue of blocking spam, specifically it states that the law does not impact an ISP's ability to determine and enforce its own policies for transmission of email (i.e.: through the use of blocklists or whatever means the ISP likes). This means that spammers cannot sue ISPs for blocking the mail they send claiming that the ISP must accept and deliver it based on the Federal law.

The fact CAN-SPAM makes illegal the use of open proxies or any form of resource misappropriation as well as use of false headers, specifically impacts spammers such as Michigan's Alan Ralsky, as all of Ralsky's spam is sent out with false headers, all through stolen open proxies. So CAN-SPAM does at least give us the law we need to put Ralsky and most of the ROKSO (Register Of Known Spam Operations) spammers in jail.

To avoid jail, spammers will have to spam from their own resources, readily identifiable IP addresses, rather than steal 3rd party relays and proxies. The problem there, which from January will affect all U.S-based spammers, is that their IPs are constantly listed on the SBL ("Spamhaus Block List"), Spamhaus' free anti-spam system used by ISPs throughout the Internet to reject incoming spam from known spam sources. Therefore one effect of CAN-SPAM we will notice, is that CAN-SPAM will channel spammers straight into Spamhaus' filter which means that in 2004 our SBL system is going to be in even greater demand.

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For more anti-spam information go to:

The Spamhaus Project

www.spamhaus.org

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