Anti-SPAM

SPAM is a registered trademark of Hormel Foods.

Unsolicited Commercial E-mail, Unsolicited Bulk E-mail, SPAM, UBE, UCE - call it what you will, it's still network abuse. It isn't the new age of marketing, free speach, or advertising. It's neither legitimate, cheap, nor effective. SPAMmers and their clients are ignorant, dishonest and amoral. They are cancerous growths on our society and they will be excised.

General sites

  • Network Abuse anti-spam site
  • The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email
  • Paul Vixie's Mail Abuse Protection System (MAPS) project - includes the Realtime Blackhole List and the Transport Security Initiative.
  • SpamCop - a free (web based) tool to help users and admins find and eliminate spammers.
  • Spam Prevention Early Warning System
  • SpamHaus - Who's behind your spam? Community anti-spammer knowledgebase.
  • ROKSO - Register of Known Spam Operations
  • RBL-type services
  • From the Trenches: One ISPs Response to the Problem of Spam - a paper by Nick Christenson and Dan Farmer.
  • S.P.U.T.U.M. - feral internet anti-spam militia. Best viewed with SLACK.
  • Hormel Foods - The original and best "spammers".
  • Spam Town USA - what more can I say?
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    MTA mods

  • Eric Allman's sendmail anti-spam site.
  • Using check_* in sendmail 8.8 - Claus Aßmann's excellent page on using and debugging the new check_* rulesets in sendmail 8.8, as well as many useful examples.
  • Miquel van Smoorenburg's anti-spam site - he has a ruleset and sendmail mod (add a map to determine MX secondaries) to prevent relay if your site isn't an MX secondary - a nice bit of work.
  • check_rcpt rule to require POP auth before relay - this page has a cf mod to require a user to authenticate themselves via their POP account before being able to send (relay) mail through sendmail.
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    USENET news mods

  • Cleanfeed - a local filter that uses the perl hooks in INN (and Cyclone, Typhoon, Breeze and NNTPRelay) to recognise spam and other network abuse and trash the message before you can send it on to your peers.
  • c-nocem - NoCeM for C News and INN - a efficient C implementation of the NoCeM protocol - PGP signed batch cancel messages.

    • Coverage of SPAM in the mainstream media

  • Spam Spill - Newsgroup cancelers go on strike. (Dispatches)

    • Connect's anti-SPAM measures

    Connect's anti-spam measures currently include (but are not limited to): These modifications are largely local work, although the check_mail rules were based on example code from the sendmail site.

    The relay checks are complicated by the fact that we have several thousand secondary MX records pointing at our machines, many not under our control, so the usual list of permitted relay domains would be a maintanence nightmare. Basing our checks on IP routing tables also means that we prevent third parties using us to avoid traffic charges, etc.

    Note also that we actively monitor abuse, and where possible, stop it at it's source.

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    Andrew McNamara (andrewm@connect.com.au)