Lazy ISP’s Attack Spam
The Wrong Way
This week I had an unhappy introduction
to being blacklisted as a Spammer.
We didn’t spam anyone and we’re vigorously opposed to
spam, so this makes what happened particularly frustrating.
You can read about Act One on my Weblog
at http://amywohl.weblogger.com
under the title Spam and Irresponsible ISPs.
Basically what happened is that a
Mailing List Service Provider we use (the one that distributes
this newsletter) appears on some Spam blacklists.
That’s because they claim he services some spammers.
I don’t know whether that’s true or not (and I don’t
have any way of finding out).
When we signed up with them it was because they came highly
recommended and they assured us they didn’t have any association
with spammers. We
have, of course, demanded that they provide us with an explanation
and a solution.
The problem is that lazy ISP’s are
being pressured by their users to do something, anything about
Spam. They want to do
something but they don’t want to spend any significant amount of
time or money (or apparently thinking) on the problem so what many
of them do is find a Blacklist site on the Internet and use it as
the filter for their service.
Apparently, they do nothing to check to
see what the blacklister blacklists, why he does it, or how he
updates or fixes mistakes to his list.
We discovered that Interland, www.interland.com,
who is not only blacklisting our newsletter, but offers their
subscribers no way to indicate that it’s a friendly sender and
they want to receive it, hasn’t even bothered to notice that
their blacklisting source is really a Blackmailer.
Right on their site they offer to “help” anyone who is
blacklisted get unblacklisted as a consulting service.
That’s outrageous!
Several of our good friends, Dave Winer
and Doc Searls, have helped me spread the alarm.
You can do that too. Also,
you might find out:
-
What’s your ISP’s policy and does it
make any sense. Good
policies are based on human beings reporting Spam, not
computers automatically detecting something that might be
wrong – or it might just be something that a computer
doesn’t understand. A
good policy also lets SPAM go to a SPAM folder that the
subscriber can retrieve it from and providers for users to
designate specific senders as Not Spam regardless of what the
Black List says.
-
Write Interland a note and demand that
they set Opinions free. Several
of our subscribers and friends have done that already. This is an opt-in newsletter.
You can’t get it without signing up for it, which
definitely means it doesn’t qualify as Spam.
If you have any good ideas about what I
should do to solve this problem, please write.
We’ve collected a few Letters to the Editor and we’re
going to publish them shortly.
You might also like to read the article
by David Berlind of ZDNet on The Hidden Gotcha of SPAM at
http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2896281,00.html
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Comments or Questions: Send Email to
opinions@wohl.com
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Entire contents © 2001 by Amy D. Wohl. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden.
