Mainsleaze
Time for today's pet peeve.Got an email this morning from an outfit promoting a conference at Olympia in London. The sender knows my real name and has a version of my email address (in a geographic top level domain, specifically .co.uk) that I have not used for some years, but which still works and is now only ever used by spammers. I keep this address live as a sort of personal spamtrap.
So, the sender is promoting a UK event to UK email addresses. Why then I wonder does he need to send it to me:
- from an IP in America belonging to an ISP well known for spam support
- with a spoofed sender address -- sender envelope is different to the from header field (answer: sender envelope is the spamhaus, from field is the outfit that has hired the spamhaus to do their dirty work for them)
There is no mention of CAN-SPAM, nor of any European or UK compliance. There is an opt out URL which resolves to an IP in a completely different network block but which also belongs to that same spam friendly American ISP.
- It is clear that the email was sent to a list of email addresses gathered by other than ethical means
- It appears to be calculated to fall into the crack between European and US law regarding spam -- is a law being broken ? (Brussels: Yes; London: Maybe; Washington: No)
- It is not advertising pornography or prescription meds and so no doubt many recipients will not see or report it as spam (but that is what it is -- email, unsolicited and sent in bulk)
This is simply a very cynical manipulation of the incompatibility of national legislation with an international entity (i.e. the Internet) and further proof that laws won't solve spam. I expect Spamhaus will pick it up before long. Too late for me though. I already found all IP space allocated to and domain names owned by the culprit and have them all blocked locally at the inbound gateway.
Category: Spam miscellany
Technorati: Spam miscellany
1. Jerry Carter23/01/2004 13:23:11
Hey Chris, nice new look for the site.
Re: American spam friendly ISP(s)... ever think of publishing a list of your personal 'favorite' spam friendly ISPs? Be a nice way for folks over here to 'opt out' of doing business with them.
Cheers!
Jerry
2. Chris Linfoot23/01/2004 14:10:08
Re new look. Thanks. Thought the old was looking a bit tired and am gradually getting to grips with this CSS thing (W3C CSS validator likes this style).
Re publishing my favourite bad guys... Well, no. Not going there. There are other sources of information which may prove useful. Try
http://hatcheck.org/blockparade.html
which lists ISPs along with what proportion of their IP allocations are listed by various entities.
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