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Privacy and Electronic Communications
This page at the UK's Information Commissioner's Office directs you to relevant regulations, guidelines, FAQs and other documents governing the sending of commercial email in the UK.
Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations
Full text of the legislation, published as Statutory Instrument 2003 No. 2426.
Guidance notes
The above Office's official guidance documents for the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations.
Companies Act (Trading Disclosures)
Information on the additional trading information a company is required to disclose in any emails that can be considered business correspondence.
Direct Marketing Association
This page links to the UK DMA's various codes of practice. The main DM Code is obligatory for members, while the specific guidelines on email marketing best practices are recommendations.
British Code of Advertising, Sales Promotion and Direct Marketing
The UK advertising industry's self-regulatory code for non-broadcast advertising includes direct and indirect references to email marketing. The code is enforced by the independent Advertising Standards Authority.
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
DNS Blacklists
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- news.admin.net-abuse.sightings
- News.admin.net-abuse.sightings is a forum for reports of sightings of net abuse.
- 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.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
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
Create a rule in outlook or simply forward the junk email you receive to questions@spamdex.co.uk | See contributors
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Please contact us with any comments or questions at questions@spamdex.co.uk. Spam Archive is a non-profit library of thousands of spam email messages sent to a single email address. A number of far-sighted people have been saving all their spam and have put it online. This is a valuable resource for anyone writing Bayesian filters. The Spam Archive is building a digital library of Internet spam. Your use of the Archive is subject to the Archive's Terms of Use. All emails viewed are copyright of the respected companies or corporations. Thanks to Benedict Sykes for assisting with tech problems and Google Indexing, ta Ben.
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