Some have said that one or the other of these two lists have not passed
any spam lately. I don't recall any spam from
poised(_at_)lists(_dot_)tislabs(_dot_)com
lately, but I have 6 recent samples of unambigous spam (e.g. stock
pump-and-dump) that came through odin.ietf.org (132.151.1.176).
It seems some spammers are using that machine as as an open relay.
From: Robert Elz <kre(_at_)MUNNARI(_dot_)OZ(_dot_)AU>
To: "Tim Kehres" <kehres(_at_)ima(_dot_)com>
cc: poised(_at_)lists(_dot_)tislabs(_dot_)com, "IETF general mailing list"
<ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org>
...
Some people require spam be bulk mail (sent to lots of recipients) - personally
I see no sense in that, there's no easy way for any individual recipient to
tell if they got the only copy of the message, or just one copy of a million
sent to different addresses.
That you cannot tell whether someone climbing through a window in a
neighbor's house is a burglar or someone who lost their keys does not
change whether a crime is being committed or whether you ought to call
the police. However, the police can investigate and often discover
whether a crime has been committed. Similarly, a responsible ISP can
often determine by various means whether spam has been sent, starting
with complaints alleging spam.
Defining "spam" as any unsolicited and undesirable mail not only
makes it impossible for strangers to sent you mail but trivializes
the offense and makes it harder to penalize the real spammers.
An individual can often determine whether a message is bulk.
For one example, if the message has been sent to other users of
a common network of Distributed Checksum Clearinghouses, then the
counts for the message's checksums will show that it is bulk.
See http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/dcc/
Judging by various indirect means including the obvious spam among
the trials submitted to http://www.rhyolite.com/cgi-bin/dccproc-demo
about 80% of spam is currently detected as such by the public DCC servers.
(People often submit obvious non-spam to that demo, presumably to
look for false positives.)
...
| One of our
| staff when sending a message to a customer asking if we could be of any
| assistance in their deployment of our software
if the customer didn't ask for help, that could be regarded as spam.
It would be pretty rare for anyone to complain much about something like
that though.
Another way that an individual can determine that a message is bulk
is by asking Google. For example,
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=+%22ima.%2Bcom%22+group%3Anews.admin.net-abuse.sightings
finds some reported spam. I hope that Mr. Kehres's employer is
not International Messaging Associates Ltd, because they appear to be
sending unvarnished unsolicited bulk advertising such as
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=200110250552.AAA03935%40localhost.radparker.com
I hope that particular example was not the message in question, because
there are special reasons that make me confident that it was unsolicited
bulk advertising.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com