I'm not suggesting that at all AND I'm not "whining." There are much
more effective ways to block spam than server filtering and blackhole
lists. Check out this article, particularly the Bayesian filters
advocated by Paul Graham...they work right now and they "learn" how to
be more and more effective:

           http://vu.iiaa.net/Lib/Tec/TI/Email/WilsonSpamCure.htm

At least that's my opinion and I could be wrong.

- Bill

P.S.  But we all know that the glut of spam won't subside until people
stop patronizing the products and services being hawked by these folks.



-----Original Message-----
From: Armando WarpKat Ortiz [mailto:warpkat@...]
Sent: Tuesday, June 03, 2003 11:20 AM
To: iiaavu@...
Cc: coach@...; i_did_not_get_my_email@yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: [i_did_not_get_my_email] Critics set up anti-SPEWS Web site

Then what do you suggest?  That we ignore the problem?  I applaud the
efforts of SBL lists only because the people that operate them actually
TRY to address the problem rather than whine about it.

If marketers had any clue about HOW to market to begin with without
resorting to guerilla marketing and bulk email that clogs inboxes, we'd
be in a better position to say that they weren't needed, however, since
marketers only think of $$$, well, then this blows the whole arguement
away that email is going to hell because of the SBL, now doesn't it?

> Blackhole lists are a barbaric, biased, mistake-prone, and inefficient
way
> to control spam. Worse.they too often hurt the innocent.
>
> Bill Wilson, CPCU, ARM, AIM, AAM
> Director
> IIABA's Virtual University
>  <http://vu.iiaa.net> http://vu.iiaa.net
>
> Be sure to subscribe to our FREE bi-weekly email newsletter. Over
12,000
> subscribers can't be wrong!
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Lisa Micklin [mailto:coach@...]
> Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2003 6:10 PM
> To: i_did_not_get_my_email@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: RE: [i_did_not_get_my_email] Critics set up anti-SPEWS Web
site
>
> thanks justin for posting this....
> i just had my ip blacklisted by spews.org, cuz of a spammer on the
same ip
> block.  i now have to move my entire server, assign new ips, change
name
> servers, and inform my thousands of users of potential down time while
all
> of this is happening.
>
> lovely, eh?
>
> lisa micklin
> www.ezezine.com
>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Sponsor
>
>
>
<http://rd.yahoo.com/M=251812.3170658.4537139.1512248/D=egroupweb/S=1706
>
093564:HM/A=1564416/R=0/*http:/www.netflix.com/Default?mqso=60164797&par
> tid=3170658>
>
>
>
<http://us.adserver.yahoo.com/l?M=251812.3170658.4537139.1512248/D=egrou
> pmail/S=:HM/A=1564416/rand=906457647>
>
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> i_did_not_get_my_email-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>
>
>
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo!
> <http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/>  Terms of Service.

http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/0503/30equal.html

Spam filters' collateral damage
Blocking devices can go too far, keep out e-mail users had requested

Atlanta Journal Consitution

By JILL KEOGH



I work for a private high school. I send our newsletters to alumni
by e-mail.

Less than two years ago, we followed the protocol to gain e-mail
addresses through the opt-in process -- the alumni have to sign up
on our Web site to receive the newsletter by e-mail.

After we spent money and time to do this right, a new e-mail
protocol emerged. We had to invest more time and money because now
you must do confirmed or double opt-ins -- once people add their
name to the list, they reply to a confirmation e-mail that they did
indeed request to have the e-mail newsletter sent to them.

If you don't follow this procedure, your e-mail delivery rates fall
drastically. This was supposed to satisfy the latest opt-in
requirements. But that went out the window when the Internet service
and e-mail providers began running filters that read all and block
an undisclosed percentage of e-mails.

Our school has also been falsely blacklisted by some Internet
service providers. They now run filters that essentially read all e-
mail without regard to whether the recipient wants it. If it sounds
like an ad, it's blocked.

Furthermore, after the ISPs block it, the e-mail is lost. There is
no protocol to send me an e-mail to state the e-mail was blocked.

We know it is blocked because constituent contacts who work in
informational technology departments are calling me and telling me
so. Or because constituents called and asked why they don't get my e-
mail any more, even though they are still in my distribution list.

I have invested more than 1,000 hours learning what I have to do
next, what tools to use, what words I can't use, to get my e-mail
delivered to everyone who asked for it. I am still not there.

The filters have no way and never will have a way of interpreting
the end users' personal choice of what to receive.

My nonprofit, private high school sends event information to our
alumni, and my e-mail has been blocked because I used terms such
as "alumni admitted free." I didn't know "free" was a forbidden word
and thus now restricted from my vocabulary.

It's a given: Spam is unpopular. But the response to that has been
an erratic, error-riddled, no-protocol, unchallenged and
unaccountable block to whatever the big ISPs think may be an ad.

Sometimes the ad is spam (unwelcome) and sometimes it is not. But if
it looks like an ad and sounds like an ad, then it's an ad and
therefore -- by the ISP's filter definition -- unwelcome. What gives
them the right to block commerce?

How much e-commerce is lost in our sluggish economy because
advertising phobics don't want to spend 30 seconds deleting e-mail
they don't want?

Don't get me wrong, I don't like getting the Viagra and casino ads,
either. But my ISP does not block my e-mails at all, and I get about
25-30 per day. It takes me less than one minute to read the subject
line and trash it like I do walking into my house with the snail
mail (some makes it into the house and most hits the trash can).

I believe in the protection of e-mail under the First Amendment
protection of commercial free speech.

The network of big ISPs and mail services banding together and
throwing out welcomed, confirmed opt-in e-mails and newsletters
because their algorithm said it was probably spam is wrong. Period.

  Jill Keogh is a high school alumni director in Lisle, Ill.

Spam blockers may wreak e-mail havoc
By Declan McCullagh
May 27, 2003, 4:00 AM PT

http://news.com.com/2010-1071-1009745.html

Here's an unhappy prediction: The explosion of spam-blocking
technology could herald the death of much legitimate e-mail.
I wrote about patents relating to this technology, known as
challenge-response technology, last week. Basically, when your
mailbox is protected by a challenge-response system, people who try
to contact you will be greeted with a response saying something
like "click on this link to deliver this message" or "type in the
word you see in the box above." The idea is to block increasingly
obnoxious spam bots but still let actual humans get in touch with
you.

In theory, well-designed challenge-response utilities won't
challenge mail from known correspondents or mail that you've
actually asked to receive. Unfortunately, many current challenge-
response systems are poorly designed, which could wreak havoc on
mailing lists and other legitimate communications. This could make e-
mail far less useful than it is today.

It's already starting to happen. SpamArrest.com began challenging
mailing list messages last year. Recently Mail-block.com and
iPermitMail.com followed suit.

When that happens, the operator of the mailing list receives a
message--from each subscriber using the poorly designed challenge-
response utility--that asks the list operator to respond to the
challenge. Replying to a handful of challenges is no big deal, but
if many subscribers start using poor challenge-response software, it
will pose a serious problem for mailing list operators. Big
corporations may be able to afford to hire someone to sit in front
of a computer and spend all day proving they're not a spam bot, but
nonprofit groups, individuals and smaller companies probably can't.

Challenge-response systems, ironically, share some characteristics
with spam: In small quantities, both are only mildly annoying to the
recipient. But as quantities increase, they make it more difficult
to use e-mail at all. MailFrontier.net is a good example: It
prevents its users from signing up to mailing lists unless the list
operator manually intervenes to answer the challenge, a process that
is exactly backward.

The enormous growth in spam means that challenge-response technology
will become more popular. EarthLink recently announced it would make
a challenge-response system available to its customers by the end of
May, and the field is wide open, with no market leader so far.

EarthLink's announcement has alarmed veteran list operators, who
view it as a model that other Internet service providers may follow.
Dave Farber, the University of Pennsylvania computer scientist who
runs the "interesting people" list, warned his subscribers: "If I
start getting a flood of challenges from EarthLink IPers that
require my response I will most likely declare them spam and you
will stop receiving IP mail. I fully expect this to be the case for
almost all the legitimate mailing lists you are on and count on."

This could make e-mail far less useful than it is today.
Editors at TidBits, the popular Macintosh newsletter that boasts
about 50,000 subscribers, wrote a message on May 13 to readers: "Be
warned that we will not answer any challenges generated in response
to our mailing list postings. Thus, if you're using a challenge-
response system and not receiving TidBits, you'll need to figure
that out on your own."

It's worth remembering that, while they may not be as glamorous as
the Web, peer-to-peer applications, or instant messaging software,
mailing lists are the Internet's oldest form of mass communication.
They date back to the original "MsgGroup" list in 1975, which the
same Dave Farber--then at the University of California at Irvine--
helped to create. Then the famous "sf-lovers" list came along, and
the rest is, well, history.

Nowadays just about every organization uses mailing lists of some
type, from Hotwire.com's cheap airfare announcements to the left-
leaning activists at MoveOn.org who organized a massive e-mail
campaign against the Iraq war. Professional organizations use them
to contact members; companies offer deals to existing customers; and
advocacy groups rely on lists to rally support for political causes.
And that's not counting services like Yahoo Groups and Topica.

Another downside to challenge-response systems is that they can be
exploited by spammers, yielding false negatives in addition to false
positives. Some challenge-response systems require only that the
sender reply to the challenge; others require only that a hyperlink
in the challenge be followed.

A more pernicious problem is that challenge-response systems trust
the "From:" line of a message. If challenge-response systems become
sufficiently widespread, spam bots may start trying to guess at who
your correspondents are--and then forge the "From:" header
appropriately--by subscribing to discussion lists or following links
from your personal or company home page. Digital signatures are
probably the only way to prevent that kind of attack.

John Levine, an author, moderator of the comp.compilers Usenet
newsgroup and veteran Internet hand, offers a gloomy worst-case
prediction. "So what will the effect of this be?" Levine asks. "You
won't be able to trust that mail from your friends is actually from
your friends, since an increasing fraction will be spam leaking
through your challenge system. What will people do? Given the basic
principle of challenge systems, which is that it's someone else's
job to solve your spam problem, people will dump their white lists
and start challenging every message."

At least right now, because challenge-response systems are so easy
for programmers to create, there are plenty of them, and the
potential for market dominance has attracted some companies of
dubious virtue. SpamArrest spammed advertisements to people who e-
mailed its customers (imagine if AOL or MSN claimed the right to
spam anyone who's ever sent you mail). Mail-block.com has been
blocked by Outblaze.com, a large mail provider, for spamming. And
MailWiper.com has been caught spamming.

For a challenge-response system to work properly, it will need to be
tightly integrated with the mail client--so it knows who you
contacted--and it should understand popular mailing list software
such as Majordomo, Mailman and Listserv. It's easier for challenge-
response companies that sell Web-based e-mail. For people using
software like Eudora and Outlook, that probably means plug-ins or an
e-mail proxy server that let the challenge-response system keep
track of your outgoing messages.

Brad Templeton, chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and
author of one of the first challenge-response systems, compiled a
useful list of design principles for challenge-response systems
earlier this month. Templeton's list has some recommendations: Never
challenge any mail that's a reply to a private message you sent; use
multiple e-mail addresses; and never challenge mailing-list
messages.

All these should be obvious, but many challenge-response systems
just don't follow them. Fortunately, the Internet Engineering Task
Force's Anti-Spam Research Group is spending some time trying to
devise a reasonable standard.

Challenge-response systems may turn out to be the only way to
inoculate ourselves against the spam epidemic. Or they may not. But
their designers and users should think twice before trusting the
future of Internet e-mail to buggy and problematic technology.


Copyright ©1995-2003 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.

At 11:55 AM 5/28/2003, peteblastpr wrote:
>Collateral damage in the war on spam
>
>'Blocklist' tactic repels some legitimate e-mail
>
>By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff, 5/28/2003
>
>Philip Jacob, who runs a small Internet service provider called
>Whirlycott.net in
>Watertown, has found himself prey to one of the toughest tactics in the
>war against
>e-mail spam: ''blocklisting,'' or as Jacob calls it, blacklisting.

This article assumes that Whirlycott.net is not a spammer. But we don't
know that to be the case.

I'm not trying to say that Whirlycott.net is a spammer. The previous
paragraph is meant to be taken literally. We don't know.

See, this is my problem as a journalist when I write against spam. I get
e-mails from e-mail marketers saying there's a witch-hunt against spam, and
that their legitimate marketing mail is being tarred as spam. And as I'm
reading these mails, I'm thinking, "This guy is so full of crap. He's a
spammer for sure."

What's made me so cynical? Well, the ACTUAL SPAMMERS are telling me that
they're not spammers. You know how it is. If you're writing your own spam
filter, the first words you include in the filter are dirty words, but then
after you've put all those words in and you're still getting spam, the very
next phrase you put in the filter is, "This is not spam." Because you know
that any e-mail that says, "This is not spam," is, in fact, spam.

I have been operating under the suspicion that EVERYONE POSTING TO THIS
MAILING LIST is a spammer, because, you know, all the spammers say they're
not spammers.

You know what? I can't even exclude myself! I edit an e-mail newsletter, it
goes out to 140,000 addresses every day. I tell you that everyone who
receives it is someone who explicitly request it. One of the reasons I know
this is because my e-mail address is in every newsletter, and it goes out
every business day, and I've been doing this since December, and I haven't
in all that time received any spam complaints at all. Not a one!

But why should you believe me when I say that? After all, the only thing
I'm saying here is that I'm not a spammer and my newsletter is not spam,
and that's exactly what the spammers say.

--
Mitch Wagner
Senior Editor
InternetWeek.com
www.internetweek.com
+1 (619) 461-4316

Critics set up anti-SPEWS Web site
By John Leyden
The Register 27/05/2003

Critics of the SPEWS blacklist have set up a Web site highlighting
their grievances against the popular service.

SPEWSMonitor.info has been established to "counter the growing
number of out-of-date, inaccurate and often malicious listings by
SPEWS of entire subnets".

Critics are aggrieved at what they say is SPEWS' hard-line stance in
blacklisting entire subnets, a perceived lack of accountability and
alleged violations of Internet standards. They argue that the
service causes unknown collateral damage to innocent parties who
happen to share the subnets of alleged spammers.

It's not the first time Spews.org has been criticised over a alleged
blanket approach to blacklisting and difficulties in communicating
with its volunteers. We thought it might be the first time that a
Web site has been set up to air these grievances. Not true -
antispews.org has been around for a while, readers inform us.

But we digress.

Defenders of Spews.org counter that organisations and individuals
make their own choices about whether or not to use the service. Its
popularity is evidence that many find it more than useful, the
argument goes.

Many people who complain against the blacklisting service use ISPs
who failed to play their part in dealing with the spam tsunami,
hence a blacklisting. Also blacklisting lists are updated more often
than Spews.org critics give it credit for.

The merits of the two sides of this argument will doubtless be fully
aired on news.admin.net-abuse.email. Hopefully the debate will
generate more light than heat but make sure you're wearing asbestos
underpants before joining the discussion, just in case.

Collateral damage in the war on spam

'Blocklist' tactic repels some legitimate e-mail

By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff, 5/28/2003

Philip Jacob, who runs a small Internet service provider called Whirlycott.net
in
Watertown, has found himself prey to one of the toughest tactics in the war
against
e-mail spam: ''blocklisting,'' or as Jacob calls it, blacklisting.

A growing number of companies and organizations are using the practice to fend
off
incoming messages from Internet addresses suspected of sending unwanted e-mail.
But some legitimate businesses have been caught in the blockade.

Last week, Jacob, 28, fielded a complaint from a customer at a Boston financial
services firm that buys e-mail services from Whirlycott. The customer's e-mails
to
another company were being returned as undeliverable. The return message
indicated
the mail had been rejected because it came from a source that was included on a
''blocklist'' -- a list of e-mail addresses of suspected spammers.

It was a familiar problem. The same customer complained in August, when messages
he'd sent to Colby College in Waterville, Maine, were also bounced back. When
Jacob
investigated, he found that Colby used a blocklist that cited Whirlycott as a
spam
source, even though Jacob insists his company has never allowed users to send
unsolicited bulk e-mail.

Ray Phillips, director of information technology services at Colby, confirmed
that the
school formerly used blocklists. ''We did find that this strategy blocked e-mail
from
some major Internet service providers' e-mail systems,'' Phillips said. As a
result of
complaints by Jacob and others, the school has stopped relying on blocklists,
instead
using software that examines each message to determine whether it's spam.

But many other organizations and Internet providers continue to use blocklists.
For
legitimate businessmen like Jacob who find themselves inadvertently blocked, the
result can be a version of what the military calls collateral damage -- the
unintentional destruction of the innocent during an attempt to destroy the
enemy.

''I actually used to use blacklists,'' said Jacob, whose day job is system
architect for
the e-commerce website Eyeglasses.com. ''Then one day I found that I was on a
blacklist.''

Despite his protests to Colby, and the college's decision to drop its blocklist,
Jacob's
Internet service continues to be listed on at least two blocklists. That's why
mail sent
by some of his customers is still getting blocked. To compound the problem,
there's
no way to know which businesses or Internet services use blocklists, or which
lists
they use.

There's evidence that aggressive efforts to screen out spam are starting to
hinder the
delivery of legitimate e-mail messages. A recent survey by the e-mail marketing
firm
Bigfoot Interactive found that nearly 40 percent of those surveyed had failed to
receive messages from friends, family members, or companies with which they did
business. Another e-mail marketing firm, Assurance Systems, set up e-mail
accounts
last year, then arranged to have mail sent to them. About 15 percent of the
messages
never arrived.

Most blocklists are set up and maintained by volunteers -- Internet users fed up
with
the flood of unwanted and often offensive e-mail messages. One Internet guide to
blocklists, www.openrbl.org, lists more than two dozen of them. In addition,
many
Internet providers and businesses create custom blocklists.

Blocklists are a powerful alternative to more costly and unreliable ''content
filtering''
software, which scans each incoming message and tries to determine whether it's
spam. (Jacob's Whirlycott markets antispam filters, among other services.) With
blocklists, if a message comes from a given address, it doesn't get through.
That's
why many Internet services and Internet-connected businesses use them.

Each blocklist has its own standards, which can vary dramatically. That worries
some
of the nation's largest Internet providers. Earthlink, for instance, draws up
its own
blocklist because of concerns about the accuracy of those created by others.
America
Online does the same, relying on spam complaints submitted by its 35 million
users.
''We believe that a lot of other lists that are available are more subjective
than
objective,'' said AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham.

Some of the independent blocklists try to avoid this pitfall by applying
rigorous
standards. Spamhaus.org, one of the best-known lists, relies on its own ''spam
traps,'' e-mail addresses that sit idle on the Internet. Any mail sent to these
addresses is spam by definition, said Spamhaus founder Steve Linford, so the
sources
of these messages are blocked. ''We don't collect complaints from end users at
all,''
said Linford, for fear these reports might be biased. In addition, the list is
under
constant review.

But other blocklists take a more subjective, radical approach. That's what
happened
to Jacob. His Internet company purchased bandwidth from another firm called
AV8.com, which operates an e-mail server that lets people send messages without
logging in. This kind of ''open relay'' server is often used to send spam,
though
AV8.com operator Dean Anderson says he doesn't allow this. Several blocklists
decided to block all AV8 addresses because the open relay might encourage
spamming. So Colby College, or any other institution that used one of these
blocklists, would reject all mail from AV8, or Whirlycott.

This kind of blocking, which penalizes the innocent as well as the guilty, is
not
uncommon. Late last year, some consumers writing to the Federal Trade Commission
found that their e-mails couldn't get through, because the federal agency uses
blocklists. Also last year, the Spam Prevention Early Warning System, or SPEWS,
blocked all mail from the 220,000 customers of Interland Inc., a major website
company, because some Interland users were sending out spam. Only when Interland
moved to drive spammers from its system did SPEWS relent.

Unlike Spamhaus' Linford and other blocklist operators, the people who run SPEWS
refuse to disclose their names, phone numbers, or e-mail addresses. A message on
the SPEWS website says that all inquiries should be posted on a public Internet
bulletin board, but no one from SPEWS responded to a posting by the Globe. The
lack
of an easy way to contact SPEWS suggests that anyone who thinks an address is
unfairly blocked will find it difficult to appeal.

Linford thinks SPEWS chose anonymity to avoid lawsuits, even though he believes
that
such suits have little chance of success. Spamhaus has been sued many times, by
companies claiming that blocklists violate their right to use the Internet
freely. Last
month it was sued again in Florida, along with SPEWS and several other
blocklists. The
plaintiffs, an organization of e-mail marketing firms called eMarketingAmerica,
say
that blocklisting unlawfully deprives them of their right to use their e-mail
addresses.

But Linford replies that blocklist operators are exercising their own right of
free
speech by making lists of alleged spammers. So far, the courts have agreed.
''We've
never lost a suit,'' Linford said.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@....

Honestly, AOL has the right to spam its own members.  So does any other
organization... it's their own network, and their own dime.  The internet is
not involved, it's all within a privately owned organization.  They DO NOT
have the right to spam any other organization's members, especially using
the other org's mail servers to replicate the mail.  That IS NOT their own
dime.  They also DO NOT have the right to forge the origin of the emails.  I
guarentee you that if a provider spammed its own customers with deceptive
offers, they'd have one helluva an exodus.  (No pun intended)
     Pink contracts would be ok, if it gave the junk sender permission to
email the company the contract was signed with.  I've never been against
this kind of commerce.  It's the kind that hits and spews my network that I
have a serious problem with, since I don't have the option of politely
refusing such an offer, the spammer forces their way in, and we have to
spend money to stop them... usually with only marginal results.

     This guy is promoting the spamming of other organizations, using
deceptive means, the two things which are totally unacceptable to me.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Armando WarpKat Ortiz" <warpkat@...>
To: <i_did_not_get_my_spam@yahoogroups.com>
Cc: <i_did_not_get_my_email@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2003 8:20 AM
Subject: [i_did_not_get_my_spam] Washington Post: A Spammer Speaks Out


>
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23386-2003May21.html
>
> And here we thought AOL was doing the spamblocking out of the goodness of
> their hearts.
>
> I always wondered how my AOL inbox had gotten filled up so fast when I had
> first signed onto the service and only gave my email address to one
> friend...and that was prior to visiting any of their chatrooms...
>
> I wouldn't be surprised if this post doesn't make it to the other group...
>
>
>
>
>
>
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> i_did_not_get_my_spam-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>
>
>
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
>
>
>

Web Vigilantes Give Spammers
Big Dose of Their Own Medicine

They Find Mass E-Mailers
And Play Tricks on Them

By MYLENE MANGALINDAN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

When all 24 office phones at Scott Richter's e-mail marketing
company started ringing at once, with nobody at the other end of the
line, employees knew they were under attack again.

Daniel Dye, the systems administrator, could do little. After 15
minutes into the lunchtime assault last month, Mr. Dye recalls
yelling, "Go ahead and pull your phones out of the walls for now.
It'll be easier to think about what to do." Examining the phone
system's central computer, Mr. Dye found that someone had hacked
into it and programmed a feature that caused all the phones to ring
at the same time.

Mr. Richter's company had been "flamed" -- attacked by a shadowy
group of vigilantes who have taken to harassing spammers using just
about any means they can dream up. Spam, or unsolicited commercial e-
mail, has set off a war between marketers and people who hate spam.
Mr. Richter, who is a mass commercial e-mailer, has become a
frequent target of attackers known as antispammers.

They form a loose affiliation that uses the Internet to coordinate
attacks from around the world. E-mail marketers often feel powerless
against them. "It's an underground cult running it," says Mr.
Richter, whose Westminster, Colo., e-mail marketing business,
Optinrealbig.com (www.optinbig.com1), pitches mortgages, adult-
related products and Viagra. "You don't know who they are."

Here's one of them: Mark Jones, a 26-year-old software engineer in
Enterprise, Ala., who calls himself a "soldier" in the war against
spam. From his home at night, he tracks down spammers by tracing the
complex routing code hidden in e-mail messages. He reports them to
what antispammers call "realtime blacklists," Web sites that track
known spam sources and allow computer administrators to block
certain Internet addresses.

Then, he fights back. "Anytime we find a source of spam," he
says, "we spam them back."

After his three children were asleep late one Saturday night last
November, Mr. Jones sat down at his PC for a bit of spammer-flaming.

First, he says, he visited a Web site, slashdot.org
(www.slashdot.org2), that's a favorite among techies; he pulled down
a list of about 10 alleged spammers. He programmed his personal
computer to send a letter to each supposed spammer in the same way
many spammers do: through so-called open relays and mail servers
that forward e-mail in ways that make it hard to track down the
sender. As his finishing stroke, he had his PC send the message to
each spammer 10,000 times.

"We use the same methods the spammers use," says Mr. Jones,
chuckling. "It's a bombardment."

Spam is out of control. It's the No. 1 complaint of most e-mail
users. AOL Time Warner Inc.'s America Online unit, the No. 1
Internet service, says as much as 80% of incoming e-mail to its
system is spam. Laws to regulate it have been proposed in Congress.
Mass e-mailers don't consider turnabout fair play. Such bombardment
can be devastating to their businesses. When Tom Tsilionis walked
into his office in Newark, N.J., one morning last month, he too was
greeted by the sound of ringing phones, 12 of them. "You're going to
have some kind of day today," one of his frazzled receptionists told
him. "Everything's down: E-mail's down; servers are down; the Web
site's down."

Mr. Tsilionis denies that he is a spammer. He runs Perfect Telecom,
a telecom and Web-hosting company whose clients include bulk e-
mailers. When he was attacked, he called his Greek data center in
Athens. He got confirmation that all 184 server computers had
stopped working, overwhelmed by roughly 15 million e-mail messages
that had arrived all at once. Meanwhile, 30,000 complaints had been
filed against Mr. Tsilionis's company with the telecommunications
companies that provide his Internet access, leading them to cut off
Mr. Tsilionis's access. His business stayed down for 10 days.
"I thought in this country you're innocent until proven guilty,"
says Mr. Tsilionis.

No one knows how many antispammers there are. Antispammers can't
even agree on a common definition of spam. Many are like Mr. Jones,
who works in solitude and says he has little idea who his fellows
are and doesn't really care. He doesn't consider any of his tactics
to be illegal.

On the receiving end, Mr. Richter, 32, last month got in the mail
five copies of Glamour that he hadn't subscribed to, followed by
four copies of Cosmopolitan days later. Among the names to whom the
periodicals were addressed: "I hate you," and "Die, spammer." It's
easy for antispammers to sign up marketers under fake or real names
for free trial subscriptions by going to Web sites such as
bluedolphin.com (www.bluedolphin.com5). Publishers are willing to
send the bills after subscriptions start.

His assistant regularly cancels unsolicited subscriptions. Mr.
Richter doesn't consider himself a spammer because he says he sends
e-mail only to lists of people who have "opted in" by indicating to
someone they have done business with that they are willing to
receive e-mail promotions.

After the telephone attack on Mr. Richter's office, Mr. Dye, the
systems administrator, called the police to report the intrusion.
Some marketers say they would love to take legal action against
vigilantes, but it's hard to track them down.

David Kramer, a Silicon Valley lawyer who has followed the spam
issue, says many antispammer tactics are illegal. Crashing a data
center by flooding it with traffic is certainly a form of
trespassing and tampering with private property, he says.

Some antispammers disavow the more-extreme tactics. These less-
fanatical activists, sometimes disparaged in antispam circles
as "quakers" or "spam apologists," advocate strictly legal
approaches such as reporting spammers to service providers.

Mark Ferguson, a 40-year-old Healdsburg, Calif., resident says he
sticks to reporting spammers to Internet services and blacklists.
But he acknowledges his fellow activists include people who use
legally questionable methods. "We have some nut cases," he says.

Clearly, a big attraction for some of the more extreme vigilantes is
bragging rights. Karen Hoffmann, a 42-year-old computer systems
analyst, attained fame among antispammers two years ago for
documenting the real-estate properties of a bulk mailer named Thomas-
Carlton Cowles, who lives in her hometown, Toledo, Ohio. She tracked
down Internet addresses he had registered, visited the physical
locations of each one. Then she took pictures of his house and
buildings in which he had offices and put them on a Web site.

Ms. Hoffmann says her objective was to dispel a myth that spammers
aren't well-off. "It turns out this gentleman lives in a very
expensive home," she says. Mr. Cowles, who heads an e-mail marketing
company called Empire Towers Corp., declines to comment, says an
Empire employee who asked not to be named, because he doesn't want
to encourage Ms. Hoffmann. Privately, says the employee, Mr. Cowles
calls her "my stalker." Ms. Hoffman denies stalking him.

Here is one of the biggest cellular provider called NTT docomo in
Japan. They provide an option to let users to specify blocking or
allowing e-mails from the Internet. The reason is because firstly,
there are a lot of bulk e-mails sent to the prescribers and secondly,
NTT docomo even charges incomming mail due to the size of data.
However, NTT docomo also adopted another policy as follows to
determine whether the e-mails from the Internet shall be passed to
cellular prescribers or not:

( i) Check the DNS of the client mail server that request e-mail
forwarding to the NTT docomo mail server from the IP address
(ii) Matching both domain name and if these are different, the mail
server doesn't handle the forwarding ...

Is it appropriate strategy to deny or reduce such bulk mailers?
There are a lot of bulk mailers who put dummy address as reply-to
address.
I allocated a personal domain and operate WWW server and e-mail
service on ADSL environment. However, my IP address is registered
under the DSL provider so, both domain address don't match !!
Is it common strategy taken by other cellular providers in other
countries?

mizo

Nobody Expects the Spamish Inquisition

By Ed Duggan
South Florida Business Journal

May 19, 2003

Spammer block lists, litigation, and state and federal anti-spam
legislation are just a few of the tactics in the increasingly bitter
war.
         The combatants include computer users, spammers, anti-spam
block list providers like Spamhaus and SPEWS (Spam Prevention Early
Warning System), Internet service providers, and permission-based e-
mailers.
         Now legitimate e-mailers say they are getting hurt and are
crying unfair.
         "It's getting out of hand," said David Bates, an attorney in
the West Palm Beach office of Gunster Yoakley & Stewart. "With the
proliferation of anti-spam laws by the states, it's easy for
legitimate, permission-based e-mail marketers to run afoul of the
myriad of new laws."
         One of his South Florida clients was sued by a law firm in
Utah, claiming the firm was sending spam under a new law passed in
the state. The Utah law calls for damages of $10 to $50 to a spam
recipient, but the law firm contacted Bates' client and threatened a
class action suit unless the e-mailer settled for $6,500.
         "That Utah law firm has filed over 2,500 suits - it's a
racket, a scam, that is being repeated in other states," he
said. "Fortunately, my client had impeccable records and could show
that the e-mail was sent after the recipient had opted in and before
he had opted out."
         Typically, the lawsuits are filed in small, remote towns
where it is expensive to defend and difficult to secure co-counsel.
         "Legitimate companies must defend themselves from terrorists
who have graduated from law school," Bates said.
         All factions have their points and virtually everyone would
like to see spam go away.
         The initial sparring took the shape of simple complaints to
Internet service providers, the companies that host the servers that
handle e-mail from customers who may include spammers.
         When the service providers could not or did not respond fast
or thoroughly enough, e-mail block lists were developed by
individuals and groups that zeroed in on known spam addresses. These
are made freely available online to networks and computer users.
         As spammers zigged and zagged on the same service providers'
servers, the lists were expanded from single addresses to blocks of
addresses. That resulted in non-spammers' mail being blocked as
well. ISPs felt pressured to get rid of suspected spammers.
         Boca Raton attorney Mark Felstein felt the wrath of the anti-
spammers and guilt by association. He registered the domain name
eMarketersAmerica.org and parked it with GoDaddy Software, a
Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Internet service provider. Complaints and a
threat to add GoDaddy's server addresses to spam block lists were
apparently enough for GoDaddy to tell eMarketersAmerica to go, daddy.
         "While eMarketersAmerica has never sent e-mail, let alone
spam, the registrar of their Web site, GoDaddy, was blacklisted by
SPEWS, Spamhaus and others," said David Hart, 54, a New York City-
based quality management consultant. "Frankly, that represents an
unconscionable effort to silence critical speech. I would point out
that GoDaddy registered a number of racist sites including
whitepower.com and nobody is suggesting that they be sanctioned for
doing so."
         An e-mail to Felstein from Ben Butler in the "Spam and Abuse
Department" of GoDaddy Software dated April 24 said: "As I am sure
you are aware, we have a no-tolerance policy against spam and
network abuse. We have received notification that our IP space has
been blacklisted as a result of association with your domain name.
Our network connectivity and ability to reach customers has been
compromised as a result of your domain, and we have sufficient
reason to believe that further connectivity issues may well occur as
a result of association with, and providing DNS [domain name
services] for this domain name. We consider this to be an abuse of
our services, and therefore against the terms of our service."
         Butler declined to discuss the heave-ho given to the
eMarketersAmerica.org site.
         Felstein said that GoDaddy Software would be added as a
defendant in the suit filed against a group of anti-spammers last
month.
         "We have an adamant no-spam policy at GoDaddy," said
Christine Jones, legal spokeswoman for the firm. "We don't take
action unless questionable activity comes to our attention."
         Some of the anti-spammers contend that Felstein is a shill
for spammers, including Boca Raton-based executive Eddy Marin, which
Spamhaus characterizes as the "No. 1 spammer in the world."
         Both Felstein and Marin denied the accusations, although
Felstein said Marin has been a client.
         EMarketersAmerica was registered by Felstein as a non-profit
trade association to represent e-mail marketers, although he won't
release members' names for fear of retaliation from the anti-
spammers, he said.
         A month after forming the association, Felstein filed suit
on its behalf against a dozen anti-spam defendants he claimed had
injured the association's members.
         Most of the anti-spammers have joined in an answer to the
suit and deny all the allegations of wrongdoing.
         They are represented in the suit by attorneys Samuel A.
Danon, with Hunton & Williams in Miami, and Paul F. Wellborn III, of
Wellborn & Butler in Atlanta.
         Management consultant Hart said his firm represents no e-
marketers, but it is reviewing the spam situation for a number of
post-secondary school clients.
         He feels that SPEWS, one of the anti-spammers named in
eMarketersAmerica.org's suit, is the most draconian in its zeal to
curb the tide of unsolicited commercial e-mail.
         "SPEWS blocks the IPs of spammers so that subscribing
systems reject the incoming e-mail," Hart said. He objects to the
secrecy involved with SPEWS and the lack of appeal from the anti-
spammers blacklists.
         "Much of the mail that the blacklists consider to be spam is
entirely lawful in those states that have anti-spam laws," he said.
He called SPEWS accountable to no one and its criteria arbitrary and
vindictive.
         "In fact, nobody will admit to running SPEWS," Hart said.
         "Nobody would argue that people do not have the right to
block mail in any manner that they choose," he said. "The issue is
the conduct and process of a third-party blacklister, their lack of
accountability and the potential for abuse."

Hello all:

This is my first time posting to the group. I hope
this information will help someone:

Too many of the the ezines I ask for get filtered to
my  "Junk Mail" folder. I wanted to know why, so
here's what I did: I ran the text of one of these
filtered ezines through the free "ezine checker" at
http://www.ezinecheck.com/ and got the results you see
below. No wonder this one wound up in my "Junk Mail"
box!
 
Ezine publishers: I'd like to see your ezines reach
the people who asked for them (myself included). I
don't agree with these spam filtering methods but at
least here's a tool which works and will get your
ezines safely past the filters.
 
You've got a good thing going with this group. I wish
all of you success!
 
Warm regards,
Sharon Iezzi

RESULTS FROM EZINE CHECK:

Here are the results of the EzineCheck on your
newsletter copy. The following table shows you which
words, phrases and other problems triggered spam
penalties, and the number of penalty points awarded:

check              1.739 points
free               0.401 points
guarantee          0.796 points
here               0.312 points
questions          0.212 points
SHOUTING 6 time(s) 1.5 Points
---------------------------------
Total Points 7.1
---------------------------------

Analysis: Risky. Your spam score is high enough to
cause delivery problems.

If your score is too high (to pass all filters it
should be less than 1), you should edit your copy to
remove the spam triggers identified in the table
above. Then test your copy again.

This checker also lets you see your targeted words
highlighted in red to make it easy to make changes.


=====
Get unlimited exposure for your ezine or newsletter.
Add yours today!
http://www.myfavoriteezines.com/ezinedirectory/links.html

Join the Down-Home Revolution!
http://www.pathwaysforliving.com

...to talk to people who've been unable to get their legitimate mail
through because of spam filters and blocklists.  Please contact me
via e-mail ASAP.  Thanks.

Hiawatha Bray
Tech reporter
Boston Globe

> Going by memory, I believe Anne was legal counsel for MAPS
> (http://mail-abuse.org).  They are in my opinion one of the better
> (and first) blacklist sites, as they tend to be pretty careful on who
> and how they put entries into their database.

Thank you, Tim.  And I hope that you will agree that care and
reasonableness is something which you have seen in all of my
advocacy (I am still involved in the other advocacy, by the way).

It is for that reason, among others, that I am always amazed that
people would imagine that Habeas is trying to force people to pay
to send email.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  What
Habeas offers is a value-added service, very similar to the U.S. Post
Office's special delivery service.  If you don't use our service, your
email will be delivered just as it always is (or isn't).  If you use our
service, you get the assurance of certainty of delivery to the inbox,
rather than to the junk folder or not at all, with all of our ISP and
spam-filter partners.  The main difference between us and the USPS
is that we don't charge individuals to use our service (and never
will).

I also hasten to add that we don't do anything which one can't do
for themselves - one can certainly contact all of the ISPs and spam
filters and get themselves whitelisted.


> You should be directing your anger most likely at the sites that
> actually use these systems.

Although it is important to understand that in the case of a site
honouring the Habeas mark, all they are doing is making sure to
deliver, and not block, mail from people using our service.  They do
_not_ "block all mail not using Habeas", and we do not advise that
they do (contrary to the patently false assertions of the group
earlier-referenced - for more on that, please see
http://www.habeas.com/about/debunk.htm).  In fact, sites which
have users and that whitelist Habeas senders do so very specifically
to help *reduce* the false positives created by spam filters, so that
users *do* get the email they want.

> My personal belief is that any system
> that relies upon the legal framework of the US (or any other
> jurisdiction) is a waste of time, as any compitent spammer can easily
> just move the entry point of the spam outside their jurisdiction.
> Anyone caught in such a legal trap is in my opinion more of a hazard
> to themselves than the community at large.

Well, that last may be, but I can assure you that our legal model is
working - we have in fact just filed our first lawsuits four weeks ago,
and they are working exactly as intended - we have found the
actual spammers, have their pay-off accounts frozen, have pledges
from the intermediaries behind whom they were hiding to cut off
anybody misusing our service to send spam, and have even been
led to the listbrokers who are selling people's email addresses to
spammers.


> But it will be interesting to see how Habeas works out.  What they are
> trying to do (fight spam using a different technique) is I believe a
> good thing - I just don't share their conviction that this approach
> will in the long run make much of a difference.

...

> Please don't be too hard on Anne and groups such as hers - they are
> genuinely trying to make the world a better place.   But until such
> time as mail systems move the ultimate decision as ot mail filtering
> down the the end user, we'll continue to have considerable collateral
> damage.

Again, thank you.  You have always been a model of rationality and
moderation, and I'm pleased to run across you again in this arena.

I'd also like to point out that Habeas very much supports the end-
user, both by offering individual licenses for free, and by providing
instructions so that end users can search for the Habeas mark in
their own inbound mail to make sure that their spam-filters don't
accidentally clobber email that they want.

Anne

Anne P. Mitchell, Esq.
CEO
Habeas, Inc.

Hello all --

Following is an article from yesterday's (April 29) NY Times.  It
details a number of sites that were recently shut down as a
result of ISP pressure in the fight against spam.

The question is:  should blacklists like SPEWS ask ISP's to stop
service to legitimate companies in order to block service to
those they think are spammers?  Is this right?  Is it worth it?

Anybody have any thoughts on this matter?

Read on...

April 29, 2003

Web Sites Shut Down in Spam Fight
By SAUL HANSELL

cores of Web sites were taken off the Internet over the weekend
because of new pressures on a commercial Internet service
provider to stop unwanted marketing e-mail, or spam, and the
companies that use it.

Most of the Web sites that were shut down had no relation to the
company accused of sending spam other than having the same
Internet service provider for their Web site. But in the escalating
spam battles, some anti-spam groups seem to care little about
collateral damage.

On Sunday afternoon, 89 Web sites operated by US Moneywerx,
a Bryan, Tex., company that operates Web sites for small
businesses, were disconnected.

They were cut off because Server Beach, the San Antonio
company that actually houses US Moneywerx's server computer,
reacted to complaints by the public and an anti-spam group who
said that a site that had US Moneywerx as its host was sending
spam.

Richard Yoo, the president of Server Beach, said he evaluated
information provided by the group called the Spam Prevention
Early Warning System that runs a Web site called Spews.org.
That site added to its list of spammers a small Los Angeles
company called NetGlobalMarketing, which was a client of US
Moneywerx.

Many Internet service providers block e-mail not only from sites
identified on the Spews.org list but from any company that
provides Web services for those companies.

Executives of NetGlobalMarketing were quoted in an article in
The New York Times last week on the efforts by e-mail
companies to block spam. The article quoted company
executives saying that all of the e-mail messages they send are
to people who have requested e-mail offers. Nonetheless, the
company has received thousands of angry and threatening e-
mails and telephone messages over the last week. And
personal information about company executives has been
placed on anti-spam Web sites.

"I am not a spammer, and we do not spam," said Alyx Sachs, the
company's co-founder. "I run a marketing company, and we use
e-mail the way we use radio or print."

Don Wood, president of Childwatch of North America, an
organization that tries to prevent abduction of children, said he
sometimes hired NetGlobalMarketing to send e-mails to parents
inviting them to events where their children can be photographed
and fingerprinted.

Ms. Sachs said the company does work for dozens of well-
established companies, including some in the travel, insurance
and entertainment industries. But, she said, they do not wish to
be identified because of the current reaction against spam.

"People are being wrongfully accused of spamming based on
rumor, gossip and innuendo," she said.

Ms. Sachs expressed particular frustration with the Spews site,
because there is no way to talk to anyone from that organization
to protest being placed on that list.

The site is registered in Russia, and its operators are
anonymous and offer no telephone number, address or e-mail
address to contact them. Nonetheless, their list is widely used
by Internet service providers looking to block spam.

Now even some other anti-spam activists have started to say
that Spews is going too far.

"Spews is very aggressive," said Steve Linford, who runs the
Spamhaus Project, another organization, based in Britain, that
runs a list of known spammers.

Spamhaus, he said, tries to respond to complaints that it has
unfairly put a company on its list, something that he said Spews
did not do.

"They don't care what is blocked and will block anything around a
spammer," he said. The effect has been powerful, he added,
saying that "Spews has brought fear" to Internet service
providers that house spammers.

The Spews site also does not appear to be very precise. Bhavin
Chandarana, who runs a Web services company in India called
Indialinks, said his firm has been listed by Spews because it
has an Internet address similar to that of US Moneywerx.

Mr. Yoo, the owner of Server Beach, said that Spews has "a
shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later mentality." But, he said that
spam had become so much of a problem that it required what
amounts to rough justice.

But caught in that pursuit of rough justice are companies like
KWA Ecological Science, a Seattle consulting firm that
specializes in salmon preservation. Its Web site and e-mail
account are served by US Moneywerx and were shut down on
Sunday.

"If someone took an action to cut spam out, I am a great
supporter of that," said Keith Wolf, the Seattle company's owner.

"But this is not good for me, as I do most of my business
working with large groups of people collaborating by electronic
mail," he added.

Inline responses... this is rather long.

----- Original Message -----
From:
<sentto-9417607-51-1051124297-chales=california.com@...
>
To: <i_did_not_get_my_email@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, April 13, 2003 1:00 PM
Subject: [i_did_not_get_my_email] Read what the anti-spam groups have done
now...


> Hello everyone,
>
> This is my first post, but I have been
> on the list for just under a month, and read
> posts from members.
>
> The reason I joined your list was because I was not getting all of my mail
> when I was using AOL.

     Very few people do... that's well known among other things.

> I am an online publisher who uses only a 100% opt in list. My concern with
> filters is not only I am not getting mail that I requested (even my own
> newsletter), but others were not getting mail they asked me to send to
them.
>
> I am really against all the anti spam groups. Not because I love spam, but
> because they have caused more damage than good.

     While I would conceed the point that the anti-spam groups can be a
detriment at times, I find that it's not really the "group", but the
"individuals."  NANAE for example has some very vocal participants, but
noone speaks for the group, and there's a great variety of opinions.

> Who gave them the right to police the net?

     "They" are owners, operators, and system administrators of ISPs.  They
have access only to their own systems.  This is a common misconception, and
I find it rather discouraging... I enable the filters on california.com that
I feel are the most beneficial, and the least costly to the customers of
california.com... nothing more.  I cannot control other people's mail
servers... I block what certain lists recommend based on their listing
policies because they agree with my criteria of what I feel is best, and
what california.com's customers think is best.  (If a list cases complaints,
it gets nixed pretty fast... we don't use SPEWS for that reason)

> They are the reason all the filters are on to begin with

     Darn tootin.  When a mail server you administer crashes under the load
of spam applied to it, don't tell me you wouldn't do the same to keep it
from happening again... or would you rather spend $10,000 for a new server
so the spammers can deliver spam to you even FASTER, and when that one
crashes, spend more money on yet another server, etc... it's a scalability
problem... SPAM adds cost without adding benefit... that's why filters
exist, though obviously the one's you've been exposed to haven't been very
beneficial to you... and that's where the rift currently exists between ISPs
and their customers.  This is a point worth exploring in greater detail.

> Why can't we use programs to filter are own email?

     Stalker Software got this one right... (we use CommuniGate Pro, a
stalker product) the webmail interface allows users to create "rulesets"
that bounce, reject, forward and discard mail according to criteria supplied
by the customer.  We have a content filter sitting behind the scenes that
tags all incoming mail as "low","medium","high" or "very high", and give
instructions on how to setup the rulesets to act on those tags.  The
blacklists block open relays, open proxies and SBL listed Spam Gangs only...
(this is rather conservative... blocking abusable servers and hard core
spammers) and the content filter tags everything else, which you can use, or
not use at your whim.

> I left AOL because they did not give me a choice, not even a letter
> that they would do this for me.

     AOL and other very large providers are in a class of their own.
Remember I said spam didn't scale?  Well, AOL is a popular target, built
into MANY pieces of spamware because they're so big... spam doesn't increase
linearly as your size increases, it increases exponentially as more and more
spammers hammer you, specifically, because you're big.  AOL has taken more
drastic action in light of this.  I would look at this in a different light.
You're blaming AOL for not providing options, but because AOL is so huge,
they can't.  The impact of even making that option availible imposes such a
computational burdon on their servers as to be unusable.
     In this case, I wouldn't blame the provider, I'd blame the spammers,
because it's not AOL's fault that they'd go deep into the red buying new
hardware if they attempted this.  In economic terms, this is an external
cost imposed on AOL by the spammers.  IE, the spammers cause the cost, and
don't foot the bill.

> I found another ISP (safenetaccess.com) that allows me to choose what to
> filter, if I want to filter at all. Which I do not, and also do not
receive
> spam. Odd? No, they do not sell my email address like many ISP's do, and
> they state that on their site.

     I see this claim made a lot, but most ISPs that I know of don't sell
email addresses... it's not in their best interests.  The larger providers
like ATT, Sprint, WorldCom, and AOL provide your address to their partners
as part of various peering agreements, and they often leak from there,
(unintentionally or not) but smaller ISPs have no incentive to share your
address, and actually benefit from not doing so.
     On the other hand, brute force attacks are real, and hard to stop.
California.com has dealt with brute force attempts via FTP, POP, SMTP, HTTP,
Finger and Telnet.  If I have to praise the spammers for one thing, it's
inginuity, but I dislike the ends to which they apply it.  We've dealt with
address harvesting and a great many other ills in misguided attempts to gain
a list of valid email addresses.  Most of our early addresses are on all
sorts of spam lists, so I regularly spam trap the customers who have
cancelled.

> Ok, the ISP's filter our mail, we do not get the ones we want, but the
> spammers still get through,
> and they sell our email address on top of it, all the while we pay them to
> do this. Insane, bad business...I say so.

     You're right... don't do business with people who behave that way.  Most
Mom&Pop type of ISPs will NEVER behave in the manner you've pointed out, and
so they probably deserve your support more than the ones you've speculated
follow the above.

> With all that said I request that you look at this site that is fighting a
> not well known company YET, that is trying to get people to pay to send
> email.
>
> As an online business owner, I have great concern, but I think we all do.
>
> Anne Mitchell, chief executive and president of this company Habeas Inc.
use
> to be head of one of those anti-spam groups, I do not remember which one
off
> hand, Spam Cop I do believe.
>
> People of these kind of groups forced the filters
> on us, and now Habeas wants to profit from us not getting our mail, or
> people not getting the mail we send them.

     1) Nobody but your ISP can "force" filters on you.  It's not as if SPEWS
has an army that terrorizes ISPs into using their blacklist.
     2) Habeas is an interesting concept...  Their idea is to licence a
copyrightable mark, and use the proceeds to sue infringing uses of the mark
in an attempt to drive spammers out of business.  It's not that they really
want to charge for each email sent, so much as a necessity of bringing the
spammers to trial (lawyers cost money after all) for copyright infringement,
and as a means of showing financial damage as a result of the infringing
use.  You can look at what they're doing in any light you want, but the fact
of the matter is that they're not forcing anyone to use the Habeas mark.

> It will start to hurt all online business owners, but not spammers, many
are
> not even in the USA,
> and may eventually effect everyone who sends email.

     Spam has been hurting lots of businesses for a long time... I still
remember the first server crash I dealt with resulting from spam... the
server was offline for nearly four hours while I cleaned up the mess, and oh
boy you should have heard the phones ringing.  Everything from important
legal pleadings not being received to an email that someone was supposed to
receive about their hospitalized sister who had been in a car accident.  We
lost some 50 customers that day, and at that time, those 50 customers
represented about 2.5% of our customer base.  That's quite a hit for one
spam run... and the spammer never paid A DIME to us to compensate us for the
lost business.
     Filters and Blacklists are an attempt at controlling costs such as
these, but they're very crude tools yet.  I can't wait to see what the IETF
comes up with, as they're saying they can stamp out spam in two years.  If
that happens, the filters and blacklists will go the way of the Gopher
protocol, with little bits and pieces being kept around for educational
purposes, but mostly depreciated and unused.  That will be a great day.

> The site I am sending you to is fighting Habeas
> would also like to offer better solutions to spam.
>
> http://nohabeas.org
>
> And if you care to read about more habeas issues,
> please go to:
>
> http://www.i-cop.org/habeas/

     Both of those are broken links right now, but I'd caution you to take
things you read with a grain of salt, even what I've written here.  I make
appeals to common sense quite often, but that doesn't always work in ths
spam world, and that's why a lot of anti-spammers have gone down paths that
seem suicidal.


     Yet another one of my emails that I'm sure won't meet with the approval
of the moderators...

I am an online publisher who uses only a 100% opt in list. My concern with
filters is not only I am not getting mail that I requested (even my own
newsletter), but others were not getting mail they asked me to send to them.

I am really against all the anti spam groups. Not because I love spam, but
because they have caused more damage than good.

Hello everyone,

This is my first post, but I have been
on the list for just under a month, and read
posts from members.

The reason I joined your list was because I was not getting all of my mail
when I was using AOL.

I am an online publisher who uses only a 100% opt in list. My concern with
filters is not only I am not getting mail that I requested (even my own
newsletter), but others were not getting mail they asked me to send to them.

I am really against all the anti spam groups. Not because I love spam, but
because they have caused more damage than good.

Who gave them the right to police the net? They are the reason all the
filters are on to begin with. Why can't we use programs to filter are own
email? I left AOL because they did not give me a choice, not even a letter
that they would do this for me.

I found another ISP (safenetaccess.com) that allows me to choose what to
filter, if I want to filter at all. Which I do not, and also do not receive
spam. Odd? No, they do not sell my email address like many ISP's do, and
they state that on their site.

Ok, the ISP's filter our mail, we do not get the ones we want, but the
spammers still get through,
and they sell our email address on top of it, all the while we pay them to
do this. Insane, bad business...I say so.

With all that said I request that you look at this site that is fighting a
not well known company YET, that is trying to get people to pay to send
email.

As an online business owner, I have great concern, but I think we all do.

Anne Mitchell, chief executive and president of this company Habeas Inc. use
to be head of one of those anti-spam groups, I do not remember which one off
hand, Spam Cop I do believe.

People of these kind of groups forced the filters
on us, and now Habeas wants to profit from us not getting our mail, or
people not getting the mail we send them.

It will start to hurt all online business owners, but not spammers, many are
not even in the USA,
and may eventually effect everyone who sends email.

The site I am sending you to is fighting Habeas
would also like to offer better solutions to spam.

http://nohabeas.org

And if you care to read about more habeas issues,
please go to:

http://www.i-cop.org/habeas/

Feel free to send me your thoughts as well.

Thank you kindly,

Kim Ward

Allo!

>In short, "too bad", I have no recourse for their stupidity. I'm
>still amazed that anyone would support these clowns in any way.

I read your prose with attention. From my side, I think, all this
anti-spam WAR, must be conduct on a more friendly and
coordonate fashion.

There is no gain to fire in all direction.

Au plaisir

Gilles B.


---
   CURCE
Collectif pour un Usage
Responsable du Courier Électronique
http://www.curce.org/m/gilles/

More details on "Report spam to SpamCop, get dubbed a spammer"

---------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------

Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2003 21:43:18 -0700 (PDT)
To: politech@...
Subject: FC: More details on report spam to SpamCop, get dubbed a
spammer
From: Declan McCullagh <declan@...>

Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2003 20:54:17 -0400 (EDT)
From: security curmudgeon <jericho@...>
To: Declan McCullagh <declan@...>
Cc: InfoSec News <isn@...>, abuse@...,
abuse@...,
      abuse@...
Subject: More problems with SpamCop, go figure.

Once again, we have been flagged as spammers by the cluebags over at
spamcop.net, who we have had a run-in or two with before. This time,
they go even above and beyond their previous levels of stupidity.

For the past year, I have been agressive on reporting spam and
maintaining a custom list of blocked domains/relays that is used on
attrition.org. For every piece of spam that came in, I would
blackhole them on our system, then report them to abuse@(their isp).
I would send all Nigerian Scam mail to the appropriate address at
treasury.gov (419.fcd@...). For domains that didn't
maintain abuse/postmaster contacts, I would report them to rfc-
ignorant.org and further blacklist their entire domain from
mailing attrition. WHat did this behavior get me? Listed on spamcop
*again*.

http://spamcop.net/w3m?action=checkblock&ip=66.80.146.7

Notice the two pieces of mail they show currently. Both of them are
my reports of spam to other ISPs. In each case, I mailed their abuse@
contact, included full headers, and prefaced the subject
with "SPAM:" so they could clearly identify the mail. Given that I
am reporting the mail TO THEM via their abuse contact, the headers
have THEIR IP space, it should be trivial to understand what is
happening here. Instead, globalvision.net and infosat.net apparently
felt the need to send my mail in and complain of spamming.

Here is the mail I sent to the abuse address at globalvision.net
(still in my sent-mail). In turn for my reporting globalvision spam,
they send my complaint to spamcop, reporting *me* for spamming. And
as we all know, spamcop will play the part of the blind sheep and
dutifully blackhole us w/o question, even though they KNOW (from
previous contact) we are as anti-spam as you can get. Their claims
of not being able to change their system are complete lies, as the
most trivial system can account for whitelisting domains.

Of course, what is SpamCop's stance on this?

http://spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/298.html

In short, "too bad", I have no recourse for their stupidity. I'm
still amazed that anyone would support these clowns in any way.

Brian Martin
Attrition.org

Doesn't mean anything actually, spammers are not
subject to US laws if they move their operations
overseas, as most have started to do. Legal measures
aren't going to do anything more than to support the
ISP's of Zambia and Nigeria.

---  wrote:
> New state law to fight anonymous spam
>
> By Peter Lewis
> Seattle Times consumer affairs reporter
>
> Consumers are expected to have an easier time
> pursuing out-
> of-state spammers in District Court under
> legislation approved
> by both chambers and expected to be signed into law
> by Gov.
> Gary Locke.
>
> Rep. Roger Bush, R-Spanaway, sponsor of the state's
> 5-year-
> old anti-spam law, said he hopes the new
> legislation,
> unanimously passed by the House on Tuesday, "turns
> into a
> cottage industry (and that) people will start
> hitting them $500 a
> pop" to make spammers cut back.
>
> The bill gives explicit authority to district-court
> judges to handle
> cases under the state's anti-spam statute. The
> original 1998 law
> outlaws unsolicited commercial
>
> e-mails that hide how they travel across the
> Internet, contain
> misleading subject lines or use a third party's
> Internet address
> without permission.
>
> Under the law, state residents who receive such
> messages can
> turn to district court to collect $500 or actual
> damages, whichever
> is greater.
>
> The new legislation was introduced at the request of
> the state
> Attorney General's Office, which said that
> district-court judges
> themselves disagreed on the question of their
> jurisdiction over
> out-of-state spammers.
>
> Complicating things further, district courts include
> small-claims
> divisions. Some judges who believed they had
> jurisdiction over
> out-of-state spammers in district courts were less
> sure about
> small-claims courts, where lawyers seldom appear.
>
> The new legislation does not address the question of
> whether
> cases against out-of-state spammers may be brought
> in small-
> claims courts. The attorney general's advice for
> consumers is to
> file such actions in more-formal district court, and
> to file against
> in-state spammers in small-claims court.
>
> There are about 50 district courts in the state.
> They have a $41 or
> $31 filing fee, depending on the particular court,
> and a $50,000
> ceiling on damages. The less-formal, small-claims
> courts have
> a $21 filing fee and a $4,000 ceiling.
>
> Peter Lukevich, a former Tukwila Municipal Court
> judge, chaired
> the legislative committee of the Washington State
> District and
> Municipal Court Judges Association when the Attorney
> General's
> Office started to push the new legislation.
>
> The office originally wanted legislation to clarify
> that small-
> claims courts could hear out-of-state spam cases,
> Lukevich
> said.
>
> But the judges' association rejected that. "We felt
> from a
> historical policy perspective that small-claims
> courts were really
> designed to be a local remedy for two people having
> a dispute,"
> Lukevich said.
>
> Even with the new legislation defendants may
> continue to argue,
> as they have with some success, that district courts
> lack
> "personal jurisdiction" over out-of-state spammers.
>
> In other words, the spammers' lawyers will contend
> that their
> clients had minimum contacts in Washington state and
> had no
> way of knowing that state residents would receive
> their
> messages.
>
> Dave Horn, assistant state attorney general, called
> passage of
> the legislation "very significant" but acknowledged
> its effect
> would be hard to measure. "I hope that the rate at
> which (spam)
> cases are thrown out of district courts will
> decline," Horn said.
>
> One of the Puget Sound area's most active spam
> fighters,
> Bennett Haselton of Bellevue, is less impressed with
> the new
> legislation's value, believing most judges already
> agree that
> consumers may go after spammers in formal District
> Court.
>
> Haselton, who has filed about 40 spam cases, mostly
> in the
> small-claims division, said his experience makes him
> believe
> there are other legal ambiguities in need of
> legislative attention.
>
> For example, while many judges have permitted his
> spam suits
> to proceed, others have dismissed them on grounds
> that a
> consumer, to recover damages, must have lost money.
>
> Peter Lewis: 206-464-2217 or plewis@...
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor
>
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> i_did_not_get_my_email-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>
>
>
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to
> http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
>
>


__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - File online, calculators, forms, and more
http://tax.yahoo.com

Report spam to SpamCop, get listed as a spammer

---------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------

Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2003 17:43:43 -0700 (PDT)
To: politech@...
Subject: FC: Report spam to SpamCop, get listed as a spammer
From: Declan McCullagh <declan@...>

---------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------

I'm not picking on SpamCop. I've covered unfriendly behavior on the
part of other "antispam" services, like (earlier this week
Mailblocks:
http://www.politechbot.com/p-04620.html

And in February we had a five-message thread on SpamArrest:
http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/politech.cgi?name=spamarrest

But SpamCop is the undeniable market leader in antisocial behavior
and recidivist overblocking, including adding my Politech server to
its "spamlist" three times:
http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/politech.cgi?name=spamcop

Jericho, below, is a well-known security expert (and curmudgeon) in
the DCarea. I've also heard from someone who hosts a list at
attrition.org who's now dealing with many megabytes of bounce
messages that haven't gone through to his subscribers, all thanks to
SpamCop...

-Declan

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2003 20:15:03 -0400 (EDT)
From: security curmudgeon <jericho@...>
To: abuse@...
Subject: jeez this is getting old, REMOVE US


http://spamcop.net/w3m?action=checkblock&ip=66.80.146.7

guys, look at the report. it is clear that we were reporting OTHER
people for spamming us. and you geniuses blackhole us for it? one is
a spamassassin report, the other is me manually forwarding mail to
infosat.net who spammed us.

and don't give me crap about taking days to remove us, i know it
doesnt take that long.

It almost sounds as if you haven't looked at the entire picture regarding
filtering and what causes them.

This whole thing started when someone read Marketing for Dummies and decided
that the internet was the best place to scam people, which most salespeople
tend to do.

I had been getting tons of mails for non-prescription Viagra, which we all
know is illegal.  I blocked the mailserver that it was coming from and ended
up with a complaint.  When I discovered who the complaint was from, I
immediately told them that I had contacted the administration in charge of
said server that very day after the complaint and said, "I'm sorry...but you
were abusing my network."  His reply was, "but your customers opted-in."  And
I happen to know it was a lie since I was the one getting the emails.

Well, sure enough, he was back and angry at the fact that I toppled one of his
avenues of scamming and told him if he didn't behave, I was going to take more
drastic action.

Mailservers get blocked for the simple reason that the admins who run them
don't know much about what they do, so they end up getting blocked.  Just
because a mail provider or ISP has been around the block a few times isn't
enough to justify any faith in the competency level of the admins.

I have made sure to lock down my servers as best as I know how so I don't fall
into this.  My guess is that your friends may have to look for a provider who
knows what they're doing.

Simply asking, "are your mail servers secure?" isn't enough anymore.  You have
to actually have PROOF that they know what they're doing, such as a config
file being used.



> Reader may be victim of spam war
>
>
> By JASON GINGERICH
> South Bend Tribune
> April 7, 2003
>
>
> Since October, I have been unable to receive e-mail from two of my  frequent
> contacts. However, they do receive my e-mail messages. They  have also tried
> to "reply" to my e-mails and still, the messages
> won't go through. I use Hotmail. They use several different e-mail
> providers.
>
> There has been no notification to them that the messages they've
> sent me have not gone through.
>
> Other contacts of theirs are receiving their e-mail messages.
> Hotmail uses McAfee and we also have Norton anti-virus installed.  What
> could be the problem? -- S.H.
>
> I don't think your anti-virus software will help you. I suspect you  may
> have become an innocent victim of the spam wars. People who send
> unsolicited e-mail (known popularly as spam) use a variety of
> techniques -- many of them deceptive -- to get their messages to
> their victims. That makes stopping spam without filtering out good e- mails
> difficult.
>
> First, you need to check out a few things on your own system. Many e- mail
> companies, including Hotmail, provide settings that reduce the  amount of
> spam you will see.
>
> If, for instance, you select Hotmail's Exclusive Junk Mail Filter,  you'll
> only receive e-mail from addresses on a list you define. If  this is what
> you've done, you can simply add these friends'
> addresses to your list.
>
> If you've purchased spam-filtering software, you also need to make  sure it
> is not moving or deleting your friends' messages. But even  if you haven't
> blocked the messages by accident, Hotmail may have  blocked them for you.
>
> The e-mail industry is struggling to find ways to stop spam --
> companies don't want their computers burdened with the messages, and  they
> don't want their customers upset by spam.
>
> So e-mail providers -- including Hotmail -- do their best to block  it out.
> To do that, they have to sometimes determine which company's  server the
> spammers are using for their messages. Then they block  all e-mail from that
> company, until the company convinces them that  they have stopped passing on
> spam.
>
> Just like in a real war, however, there are innocent victims.
>
> If Hotmail has blocked your friends' Internet providers, the best  thing you
> can do is contact Hotmail, and have your friends contact  their Internet
> providers. If you can't convince your e-mail
> providers to get along, one of you will need to switch to a
> different company.
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Get
> 128 Bit SSL Encryption!
> http://us.click.yahoo.com/xaxhjB/hdqFAA/VygGAA/8vOslB/TM
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------~->
>
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> i_did_not_get_my_email-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>
>
>
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

New state law to fight anonymous spam

By Peter Lewis
Seattle Times consumer affairs reporter

Consumers are expected to have an easier time pursuing out-
of-state spammers in District Court under legislation approved
by both chambers and expected to be signed into law by Gov.
Gary Locke.

Rep. Roger Bush, R-Spanaway, sponsor of the state's 5-year-
old anti-spam law, said he hopes the new legislation,
unanimously passed by the House on Tuesday, "turns into a
cottage industry (and that) people will start hitting them $500 a
pop" to make spammers cut back.

The bill gives explicit authority to district-court judges to handle
cases under the state's anti-spam statute. The original 1998 law
outlaws unsolicited commercial

e-mails that hide how they travel across the Internet, contain
misleading subject lines or use a third party's Internet address
without permission.

Under the law, state residents who receive such messages can
turn to district court to collect $500 or actual damages, whichever
is greater.

The new legislation was introduced at the request of the state
Attorney General's Office, which said that district-court judges
themselves disagreed on the question of their jurisdiction over
out-of-state spammers.

Complicating things further, district courts include small-claims
divisions. Some judges who believed they had jurisdiction over
out-of-state spammers in district courts were less sure about
small-claims courts, where lawyers seldom appear.

The new legislation does not address the question of whether
cases against out-of-state spammers may be brought in small-
claims courts. The attorney general's advice for consumers is to
file such actions in more-formal district court, and to file against
in-state spammers in small-claims court.

There are about 50 district courts in the state. They have a $41 or
$31 filing fee, depending on the particular court, and a $50,000
ceiling on damages. The less-formal, small-claims courts have
a $21 filing fee and a $4,000 ceiling.

Peter Lukevich, a former Tukwila Municipal Court judge, chaired
the legislative committee of the Washington State District and
Municipal Court Judges Association when the Attorney General's
Office started to push the new legislation.

The office originally wanted legislation to clarify that small-
claims courts could hear out-of-state spam cases, Lukevich
said.

But the judges' association rejected that. "We felt from a
historical policy perspective that small-claims courts were really
designed to be a local remedy for two people having a dispute,"
Lukevich said.

Even with the new legislation defendants may continue to argue,
as they have with some success, that district courts lack
"personal jurisdiction" over out-of-state spammers.

In other words, the spammers' lawyers will contend that their
clients had minimum contacts in Washington state and had no
way of knowing that state residents would receive their
messages.

Dave Horn, assistant state attorney general, called passage of
the legislation "very significant" but acknowledged its effect
would be hard to measure. "I hope that the rate at which (spam)
cases are thrown out of district courts will decline," Horn said.

One of the Puget Sound area's most active spam fighters,
Bennett Haselton of Bellevue, is less impressed with the new
legislation's value, believing most judges already agree that
consumers may go after spammers in formal District Court.

Haselton, who has filed about 40 spam cases, mostly in the
small-claims division, said his experience makes him believe
there are other legal ambiguities in need of legislative attention.

For example, while many judges have permitted his spam suits
to proceed, others have dismissed them on grounds that a
consumer, to recover damages, must have lost money.

Peter Lewis: 206-464-2217 or plewis@...

Reader may be victim of spam war


By JASON GINGERICH
South Bend Tribune
April 7, 2003


Since October, I have been unable to receive e-mail from two of my
frequent contacts. However, they do receive my e-mail messages. They
have also tried to "reply" to my e-mails and still, the messages
won't go through. I use Hotmail. They use several different e-mail
providers.

There has been no notification to them that the messages they've
sent me have not gone through.

Other contacts of theirs are receiving their e-mail messages.
Hotmail uses McAfee and we also have Norton anti-virus installed.
What could be the problem? -- S.H.

I don't think your anti-virus software will help you. I suspect you
may have become an innocent victim of the spam wars. People who send
unsolicited e-mail (known popularly as spam) use a variety of
techniques -- many of them deceptive -- to get their messages to
their victims. That makes stopping spam without filtering out good e-
mails difficult.

First, you need to check out a few things on your own system. Many e-
mail companies, including Hotmail, provide settings that reduce the
amount of spam you will see.

If, for instance, you select Hotmail's Exclusive Junk Mail Filter,
you'll only receive e-mail from addresses on a list you define. If
this is what you've done, you can simply add these friends'
addresses to your list.

If you've purchased spam-filtering software, you also need to make
sure it is not moving or deleting your friends' messages. But even
if you haven't blocked the messages by accident, Hotmail may have
blocked them for you.

The e-mail industry is struggling to find ways to stop spam --
companies don't want their computers burdened with the messages, and
they don't want their customers upset by spam.

So e-mail providers -- including Hotmail -- do their best to block
it out. To do that, they have to sometimes determine which company's
server the spammers are using for their messages. Then they block
all e-mail from that company, until the company convinces them that
they have stopped passing on spam.

Just like in a real war, however, there are innocent victims.

If Hotmail has blocked your friends' Internet providers, the best
thing you can do is contact Hotmail, and have your friends contact
their Internet providers. If you can't convince your e-mail
providers to get along, one of you will need to switch to a
different company.

The following is a story that ran in a recent edition of "The
Navigator," MediaMap's email newsletter service.  This is
another example of how important messages -- in this case,
those sent by PR professionals to reporters -- are getting
blocked by spam filters.  It further underscores the significance
of this problem.

Don't let spam block your news
--------------------------------------------------
----------------------

         by Jen Tsolas

 
Most media outlets get swamped with unsolicited e-mails. While
your news release might be news to you, it might be mixed with
spam items such as "Consolidate your debt now!"

MacWorld, Wired, Cnn.com, and Computerworld have
addressed spam the past month. Maryfran Johnson, editor-in-
chief of Computerworld, wrote in her March 17 article
"Spamming Tsunami" that Computerworld outsources a spam
filtering service provided by Postini. The filter catches "a
whopping 45 percent of all the e-mail Computerworld receives,"
she said. How confident are you that your e-mails fall into that
other 55 percent?

Johnson said she receives at least 200 e-mails every eight
hours, despite Computerworld's filter.

Before sending your latest release or pitch, consider the
following:

* Filters block e-mails that are sent to numerous recipients. The
more recipients, the more likely the filter labels the e-mail as
spam.
* Avoid using common blocked words such as free, new or now.
* Symbols in the subject line can trigger a spam block. An
exclamation point might cause you lost exposure.

If your e-mail gets through the spam filter, more obstacles
remain. Johnson said that e-mails containing the word "press
release" in the subject line or body of the message guarantee a
direct trip to her deleted items box. E-mails with jargon-laden
copy are almost immediately junked. Don't display your client's
corporate message in the subject line. Johnson said that she
often sees certain phrases such as "end-to-end solution," which
cause her to delete the e-mail.

Writing in plain English and sending your releases to a targeted
contact list might seem like old advice, but it is worth it,
especially considering that counter-spam efforts are just heating
up. The Anti-Spam Research Group met last month and
discussed technological solutions for fighting spam. Twenty-six
states have anti-Spam laws.

MacWorld Editor, Rick LePage, longs for the old days. "I miss the
days when Spam came only from a can, or even better, was a
Monty Python sketch," he said.

Hi,

My ISP, TheWorld.com, nicked my eMail again with yet-another
false-positive.  Unlike the last time where I could not get the sender
(an eTicket supplier) to tell me what the fail message was, this time
the sender DID tell me what the fail message was, and I was able to
catch my ISP red-handed and complain about it directly.  The only good
thing is that at least my ISP fails the message back to the sender
instead of silently dropping the bits in the trash like some major
ISPs do.  :-(

This particular eMail was no life or death issue, but I thought I'd
mention it and congratulate the sender for providing this information.
  "Who is the sender," you ask?  None other than Yahoo Groups who hosts
this site.

They send you an eMail, a copy of which I have placed below, which
takes you to a website where you can get the information you need.  If
more senders had this kind of capability, we would begin to see the
true magnitude of the problem of ISPs throwing away the good stuff.

Anyway, thank you, Yahoo.  Here's and example what Yahoo sends (less
personalized info).

Bye,
Jeff

======================================================================

Hello,

You belong to one or more email groups provided by Yahoo! Groups
(groups.yahoo.com). Email from these groups can be recognized by
looking for a group name in the message Subject line, like
[pet-owners] or [music-fans].

Recently, messages sent to you from Yahoo! Groups have been
returned to us as undeliverable. To prevent any problems with your
email service, we have temporarily turned your Yahoo! Groups
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If you are reading this message now, the delivery problem appears to
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To turn your Yahoo! Groups account ON:

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