David A. Windham

No I Can’t Stop Your Spam Revisited

* Spam (R) (capitalized) is a registered trademark of a meat product made by Hormel. Use of the term spam (uncapitalized) in the Internet community comes from a Monty Python sketch and is almost Internet folklore. The term spam is usually pejorative, however this is not in any way intended to describe the Hormel product. This is a follow up on my previous posts No, I can’t stop your spam.

The more I talk computers, the more I hear spam.. client after client.. and this is the primary reason I don’t run any client emails through our servers. They are better served by an ISP or hosting provider with 24/7 support and I don’t have to deal with the security risk associated with qmail. I began receiving some strange notices from one of my servers last week and after a good look at the server, we discovered some issues with security, qmail, and smtp..
so here’s my quick advice and some further reading material.

Most spam originates from a small number of outfits, and ever since the Cam Spam act of 2003 gave some bite to laws against unsolicited email, most of these outfits try to conceal their identities by relaying, using small ISP’s etc.. this is what I say, if you maintain a server or an entire network, you should feel obligated to make sure that it is secure for the benefit of everyone. And my advice to anyone who receives spam. Report it here and don’t publish an email address unless absolutely necessary.