Links and reference sites

Who's who in the battle of the anti-spammers

Spam Stuff

• Spam.Abuse.Net
• Spamfo
• Spam Delenda Est
• SpamPrimer
• AntiSpam.MSExchange.org
• Paul Graham
• Spam Laws
• SpamLinks
• Anti-Spam-Tips
• Quatrocantos.com

Blogs

• Terry Zink's Anti-spam Blog
• The Spam Diaries
• Chip's Deliverability Tips

DNS Blacklists

• Spamhaus
• SpamCop
• SORBS

Old reference sites of interest

Frequently Asked Questions

Email Abuse

Abuse of email, including mailbombs, unsolicited bulk email.

Email Abuse Resources

Currently unavailable

Internet Abuse

Another list of documents

Most of the FAQs about the news.admin.net-abuse.* usenet hierarchy

Procmail

A mail filtering system for unix

Frequently asked questions about spam

Legal and ethical issues with online advertising

Deciphering E-mail and Posts

A huge list of resources

Tactical Net Abuse

Dealing with online trolls

Dealing with Trolls, Crossposting and Flames

How to protect your newsgroup from vandals.

Teergrubing

Building tar pits to slow down email. Generally ineffective.

CAUCE FAQ

About the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email.

Address Forgery

How to break your email address. Doing this at all when sending email is extremely rude. Doing this the wrong way on usenet, ditto. This document will tell you the right way to do it when posting to usenet - then it's only somewhat rude.

Filtering Mail

Filtering mail on unix systems using procmail, mailagent and the elm filter

news.admin.net-abuse.*

All about the news.admin.net-abuse.* usenet hierarchy

RFCs

RFCs are the working documents and rules of the Internet. They are the authoritative answer on any internet related technical question.

• RFC Index

Some relevant RFCs:

Netiquette

RFC 1855

Internet Protocol

RFC 792, RFC 1122

Private Addresses

RFC 1918

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)

RFC 821, RFC 2821

Mail Format

RFC 822, RFC 1138, RFC 1148, RFC 1327, RFC 2156, RFC 2822

Post Office Protocol (POP3)

RFC 1939, RFC 1957

HTTP/1.1

RFC 2068

Site Security

RFC 2196

Mailbox Names

RFC 2142

Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP)

RFC 977

Other Resources

Usenet

news.admin.net-abuse.email

News.admin.net-abuse.email is a forum for discussion of possible abuses of e-mail. Possible topics include mailbombing, denial-of-service attacks, "listserv bombs", unsolicited and/or unwanted mail, email address lists, mailing list abuse, large-scale mailings in general, chain letters, "email viruses" such as Good Times, filtering software such as procmail, and so forth.

High noise. Moderate signal.

• Newsgroup
• Charter
• news.admin.net-abuse.* FAQ
• news.admin.net-abuse.email FAQ

news.admin.net-abuse.usenet

News.admin.net-abuse.usenet is a forum for discussion of possible abuses of Usenet. Possible topics include spamming or Excessive Multi-Posting (EMP), Excessive Cross-Posting (ECP), Usenet chain letters such as MAKE.MONEY.FAST, forged or third-party cancellations, broken Usenet gateways, forgery of another user, forged approvals in moderated groups, massively crossposted "flametrolls", abuse of the newsgroup creation system, general purpose netiquette, and so forth.

High noise. Low signal.

• Newsgroup
• Charter

news.admin.net-abuse.sightings

News.admin.net-abuse.sightings is a forum for reports of sightings of net abuse.

• Newsgroup
• Charter

alt.spam

Originally intended for the discussion of SPAM it's now mostly discussion of email and occasionally usenet abuse. A kinder, gentler news.admin.net-abuse.email, the signal level is lower, but so is the noise level. A good place for newbies to ask for help and advice.

• Newsgroup

Mailing lists

SPAM-L

SPAM-L is a LISTSERV mailing list created on August 18th, 1995 and is dedicated to "Spam prevention and Discussion". That means discussion of spam-prevention, not debating the merits (or lack thereof) of spam. Tips, tricks, procmail recipes, resources forfighting spam, etc. are all welcome. In addition, many people copy SPAM-L on their response to a given spam. This is OK, within certain guidelines.

• FAQ
• Subscribe
• Archive

Spamtools

The spamtools mailing list is dedicated to software tools that detect and process unsolicited bulk e-mail. Tools for any platform are of interest, although most user-level tools are written for Unix and for Windows, and most server-level tools are for Unix.

• Subscribe
• Archive

Freemail

Hosted by the Forum for Responsible and Ethical Email it's a good place to kick around ideas, call for local help, bitch about the website, etc.

• Subscribe

Other Documents and Websites

Spam fighting at abuse.net

Lots of good stuff hosted by abuse.net, the net abuse clearinghouse. Includes lots of ways of filtering spam of all flavours from your account or an entire site.

S.P.(U.T.U.)M.

Primarily about usenet spam rather than email spam. Well worth a read, particularly SpuTools®

Tracking the source of email spam

Ed Falks fine description of what the different lines in an email header mean, and what to look at to trace the source of a spam

All about spam

Introduction to spam, and a few ways to reduce the amount you get

The Anti-Spam HOWTO

Good, short introduction to the basics of decoding headers and finding the right postmaster to complain to

The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email

Lots of background, history and politics

Death to Spam!

Some good advice on retaliating against spam. Be very careful about threatening Denial-of-Service attacks against the host ISP, though. Doing it is illegal in most places, threatening it may be illegal in some.

Jason Walter, have a nice day!

One case study in spammer hunting.

Yahoo - spam

Lots more resources at Yahoo! (honestly)

 

Community Resources   Conferences Spam Conference Organizations A Plan for Spam CAUCE SpamCon Foundation Internet Mail Consortium Spamhaus Clueless Mailers Research A Bayesian Approach to Filtering Junk Email An Evaluation of Naive Bayesian Anti-Spam Filtering Learning to Filter Spam Email: A Comparison of a Naive Bayesian and a Memory Based Approach Boosting Trees for Anti-Spam Email Filtering Boosting Trees for Anti-Spam Email Filtering (Part 2) A Countermeasure to Duplicate-detecting Anti-Spam Techniques News Slashdot Spam Conference Legal Spam Laws Blacklists Utilities that let you check several lists via a Web Interface DNSBL Database Check checks a given IP address against over 250 (!) known blacklists. Osirusoft lets you search shared blacklists run by ORB*, SpamCop, and a variety of smaller lists. UXN Spam Combat provides a gateway to check some MAPS, Osirusoft, and Spamhaus blacklists. DNS-based Spam Databases includes links to all, plus notes. Platform-dependent utilities blq is an extensible Unix utility that can check any DNS-based blacklist. Several (including MAPS and Osirusoft) are included in the default installation. Information Services SpamCop provides a DNS-based blacklist, supported by donations. Distributed Sender Boycott List lists IP address of servers that have sent e-mail to a spamtrap address. Relay Stop List by Visi.com lists IP addresses that have (a) transmitted spam to visi.com and (b) are shown to be running on an open mail relay. Mail Abuse Prevention System ("MAPS") publishes several continually updated lists of "problem hosts" that system admins can subscribe to and use for filtering purposes. Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse (DCC) attempts to identify email "bulkiness" and other qualities by comparing checksums reported by a community-based system of clients and servers. RFC-Ignorant lists servers that don't follow Internet standard ("RFC") documents. Distributed Real Black List ("DRBL") puts IP ranges to a community vote before they are added to the blocking list. Spam Reporting maintains contact addresses on where to complain when you receive a spam. RG AV - Spam Filter RG-AV.COM the first spam filter ever! Bloodgate Spam Stats Avoiding Spambots Email obfuscators Hivelogic Email Address Encoder encodes your email address using numerical equivalents and wraps the result in JavaScript. Advanced Email Link Generator with Anti-Spam Encoder has an obfuscation option. Escrambler uses simple client-side JavaScript to prevent robots from harvesting e-mail addresses from your Web site. The Anti-Spam Machine is a simple tool that rewrites your e-mail address (or any text) in alternate notation that may fool some address-scraping robots. MHonArc is a mail archiver with address obfuscation features built in. SpamSecure is a for-pay service that claims to prevent address scraping through unstated methods. E-mail poisoners Note: Email poisoners work by creating "fake" email addresses on your Web site, intended to confuse and confound Web-scraping spiders. There's considerable controversy surrounding their use, as they could lead to an increase in unwanted traffic and abuse, especially as some of those "fake" addresses could lead to real people. We encourage you to discuss the issues surrounding email poisoners before considering their use. Wpoison Subarplum SpamCon Discussion Server-level tools "Using Apache to stop bad robots" is an article that details ways of determining which robots act irresponsibly in attempting to gather email addresses, and suggests to stop them. "Stopping Spambots: A Spambot Trap" uses Linux, Apache, mod_perl, Perl, MySQL, ipchains and Embperl. Miscellaneous Essays on Junk Email (Spam) How do I stop Spam? How to advertise responsibly using email and newsgroups or how NOT to Make Enemies Fast!

 

 

 

 

Have another reference email us at questions@spamdex.co.uk