Mewlan Anti-SPAM resource center
 

This material is designed to help you avoid, filter, and fight against, UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email). While Mewlan tries to block as much UCE as possible, it is impossible to block all of it. Here we explain why, and show you how to help us. We cannot insure that you will not receive unsolicited email. However, we do prohibit our customers from sending out UCE, and we do block mail servers that are known sources of UCE.

UCE may be the most difficult problem faced by Internet Service Providers and their customers. Many of our customers cannot understand how anyone got their email address and they are very offended at the type of email that is addressed to them by strangers. We are all in the same boat. Fortunately our boss knows that if he walks up behind our desk when we happen to be checking our email, a picture of a naked person in a compromising position does not mean that we are engaged in behavior that is not appropriate for work. Your boss, spouse or children, may not be so understanding, and this is one reason why we are concerned.

Now we are seeing cases of SPAM that appears to be addressed to you from someone here at Mewlan. This amounts to fraud and could lead to embarrassing consequences for the customer who's email address was forged into the message. We have not been able to design a solution for this that does not risk blocking your legitimate email. The only thing we can do is block the mail servers who are sending these messages out.

Another reason we must block SPAM may not have occurred to you. We have to pay the bill for all of this. Our mail servers, and our connections to the network can become swamped with this flood of unwanted email. This can mean severe delays in email delivery and even reduced network performance (spelled S L O W) unless we make sure that we have enough resources to deal with the deluge. This is not how we would prefer to invest the money you pay us for service, but we have no choice.

Many people expect these problems to be resolved by their service provider or their government. While service providers and laws may be able to contribute some solutions, they may never be able to fix this problem. Passing a law in the United States is not going to stop the flood of SPAM from outside the country, it would simply move many of the sources outside of the U.S. The Internet is world-wide. There are people all over the world who are interested in making money, and many of those people do not care whether they make it honestly or otherwise.

One of the arguments that SPAMmers make is that no one gets hurt. Not so! In fact, these people are attempting to make money by taking advantage of resources that they see as free. You and I pay for these resources and the SPAMmers do not.

Avoiding SPAM

Mewlan does not give out your email address or any information about you to anyone. See our Privacy policy. SPAMmers collect email addresses off the Internet in a variety of ways. If you use your Mewlan email address when you post a bid at an auction site, sign up for some free service, post messages to chat rooms, bulletin boards, resume listing services - anywhere that is a public forum, you can expect to see UCE as a result.

Many people are wise to this, and sign up for a free email address that they may use instead. When the mailbox starts to get flooded with junk, they switch to another address. They only give out their personal email address to friends and family. We take this for granted with our cell phone numbers; after all, you have to pay to take calls on that cell phone. You only use it for a good reason.

If you have a web page that appears in search engines, and you have used your real email address there, unfortunately SPAMmers will also harvest your email address from there.

Are you a promiscuous emailer? Do you know one? Promiscuous emailers send copies of cute or urgent messages to a list of "friends", often more than 100 people. Some of the people they email will also be promiscuous, and will send the message on to still more people. Almost right away your email address (listed on the CC line of the message) will end up in the inbox of a stranger. Eventually it may end up in the hands of a person who contributes these addresses to a SPAMmer.

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Most of these SPAM messages have a link to click on to discover more about what they are selling. Some also have an "unsubscribe" link at the bottom. In some cases this link does not work, but sometimes it does. Many people who study SPAM have discovered that the unsubscribe link, should you use it, will actually tell the SPAMmer that the message reached a real human being. Congratulations! Your email address just quadrupled in value.

The worst case we have seen included an 800 number to call to  unsubscribe from the list. Anyone who called that number not only verified their email address, they gave the perpetrators their phone number, via caller ID.

We suggest that you not use the unsubscribe link unless you can see that this is a valid mailing list or it is related to a company you recognize. Bear in mind that you may in fact have subscribed to some free service and agreed to receive information email or a newsletter of some kind. If you recognize the name of the company, you can assume that the unsubscribe link will work.

Blocking SPAM

There are a variety of services and programs that will help you block SPAM.

You must understand that while Mewlan will make a good faith effort to stop major flows of this stuff, we will never be able to block all of it. The SPAM Detectives section below explains why this is so.

If you decide to use a program to block SPAM yourself, you will begin to appreciate how difficult it can be to block only UCE, and nothing else.

The first step in understanding how these programs work is to understand how email works in general. Postal mail is a good analogy: When mail for you arrives at the post office, they place it in your mailbox. When you pick up the mail, it is in your hand, and no longer in your mailbox. If you are using an email client like Netscape Communicator, Microsoft Outlook Express, Eudora, or Incredimail, this is exactly what you are doing. You are picking the mail up and storing it on your own machine.

Roll-your-own filters

Most mail clients allow you to define custom Filters that will process your email in a certain way, based on rules that you program into the filter. Filters are based on looking for certain strings in the Headers, subject, or body, or the mail message.

This is the least expensive and safest solution, if implemented properly; but it is only as effective as the amount of effort you are willing to put into it.

Pick your email client and learn how to set up your own Filters: Outlook Express, Eudora, Netscape Communicator.

Server based solutions

Server based SPAM blocking services either provide a mailbox for you on another server, or check the mail on your existing server.

Examples of this type of service are:

Client based solutions

This type of mail filter is ideal, because you have a lot of control over what you want to receive. It does require some minding though. For example, a friend may type "XXX" or "****" or "teen lust" into a mail message, or forward something that they found funny to you. Unless you have added them to your Friends list, the message will be cleaned out of your mail box. You must review your SPAM program list of bad messages regularly to assure that you are not missing legitimate messages.

Examples of this type of service are:

There are several hundred other programs, some free, some for a modest fee, that you can evaluate at your favorite download site. Some come with a list of ready-made filters. Others require that you build your own.

Reporting SPAM

The secret to success in reporting SPAM is in reporting it to the right party. Mewlan does not allow our customers to engage in UCE activities, even if they use another mail server to do this. So, unless someone has slipped by our notice, we are not a source of SPAM. (On occasion someone will violate our acceptable use policy. They will not get too far into this before we identify the activity and lock down their ability to send email or even lock the account out entirely. We then contact them, explain the problem, and give them a single warning. If they repeat the activity, we cancel their service.)

While the best thing to do is to penalize the server that sent the message, it is not always possible to do so. Servers who do this for a living are obviously not going to pay any attention to your complaint. There are no laws that apply universally to SPAM, and any U.S. laws that might be applied, will not apply to servers outside the United States. Complaining to your service provider may help if they are able and willing to block abusive servers. Mewlan does this, but there are limits to what we can do. If the message really did come from an account on a major ISP or mail provider, we cannot block them.

Whoever you report the SPAM to, you must include the full headers of the offending message in the complaint. When you report SPAM, the most useful addresses are postmaster, and abuse. If you get UCE from a yahoo account, for example, forward the message with full headers to abuse@yahoo.com. Yahoo actually does have an active abuse prevention system, but some always slips through because it is a free, and essentially anonymous email service.

Mewlan examines mail messages sent to spam@Mewlan.com. We see patterns of hundreds of messages being sent from a given server, which we then block from sending any email to Mewlan.

There are also anti-spam organizations that you can join, most notably spamcop.net, which collect information about SPAMmers and attempt to fight back. Spamcop also provides filtering and tips on how to do it yourself.

SPAM Detectives

If you have any questions about the character or motives of people who send you all of this SPAM, you need only look at the methods they use to deceive your ISP, and you. SPAMmers take advantage of inexperienced mail server operators to blanket the world with UCE. We often trace SPAM to a mail server running at a school or some small company where the server administrator is a novice who has left the server open so that anyone can send email through it. There are also ISPs that explicitly allow UCE, or tolerate it.