At 10:57 AM 9/23/97 -0500, W. Wesley Groleau x4923 wrote thusly:
Over the past six months, a significant number of individuals have begun
forwarding multiple copies of every spam message they receive to the IRS
and other federal agencies. Frequently, these messages are transmitted via
procmail filters and are not being screened by the recipient. The result
is that literally thousands of messages are being forwarded to the IRS
every week with complaints that fall outside of the Agency's
jurisdiction. The irony is that those complaining about SPAM have become
offenders themselves.
This situation was further exasperated recently where a programming glitch
in an automated mail filter caused what effectively was an email bomb
attack on the IRS. The individual responsible could have faced federal
criminal charges for their negligence.
Effective immediately, please remove "net-abuse" from all automated mail
responders and limit referrels to that address to tax related matters.
If the volume of mail continues to grow at the current rate, I'll be forced
to take the email server off-line.
Heh, if the level of SPAM continues to grow, me might all be forced to do
the same...
Inspector Andrew Fried
IRS Internal Security
Interestingly, a few weeks back the address was bantered about this group,
and I attempted to get in touch with someone at the IRS network operations
centre. Unfortunatley that person and I have differing schedules and he'd
been out several times when I was able to contact his office on his schedule.
This message reminded me to attempt to contact him again, and that fellow
was unaware of any spam-collecting policy, but gave me the contact info for
the net admin of the inspectors division. One Inspector Andy Fried. I've
left him voicemail requesting an elaboration or pointer to an online policy
document detailing acceptable use of the net-abuse address ("what exactly
should be construed to be a tax matter?"). Whenever I get such
information, I will pass it along to this group.
It would seem to me that IF someone were to auto-forward identified spam
(which is clearly against their brief policy statement above at this
point), that they should ONLY forward those which met the criteria of 'fast
money' and other pyramid schemes. The "buy our product" and "free sex
passwords" crap doesn't even border on tax issues.
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Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies. I'll get my copy from the list.
Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering
Post Box 2395 / San Rafael, CA 94912-2395