CAUCE News **EXTRA** for September 21, 1997

[John C. Mozena]

THREE SPAMMERS DOWN, BUT MUCH WORK REMAINS

By J.D. Falk
CAUCE Co-Founder and Provisional Board Member

"Cyber Promotions, Quantum Communications, and NancyNet are *not*
experiencing outages through the AGIS network at this time. Their
connections to AGIS have been *shut off* due to ongoing security issues
and other related matters." 
		-- AGIS network problems page, Sept. 19, 1997

To most Internet users, the announcement above seemed to herald almost a
new age in Internet communications.  I know that when I first heard about
it, I felt as if a great weight had been lifted off of my shoulders.  It
truly seemed as if September 19 should be declared a holiday. 

Unfortunately, as refreshing as it is to see that AGIS appears to have
begun its trek back to responsibility, and a place of honor with the other
national Internet backbones by taking a stance against network abuse, when
it comes right down to it this isn't going to make much of a dent.  In
fact, things are probably about to get worse. 

Up until today, the only safe home base that spammers could get was with
AGIS and the companies to which it sold connectivity. 

Almost every ISP out there has policies banning spam, and an even higher
percentage kick people off for it.  In order for one of these unscrupulous
e-mail marketers to have a web page or receive e-mail after they started
sending out their masses of unwanted messages, they had no choice but to
contract with Cyber Promotions, Quantum Communications, NancyNet or other
spammers hosted by AGIS. 

The address blocks formerly used by those three companies are blocked from
many portions of the Internet. 

That also made it easier to filter -- if a message had a return address of
savetrees.com (a Cyber Promotions domain), there's really no question that
it was spam. 

Now that those three are off the air, we can expect to see more spammers
getting throw-away accounts with innocent ISPs, using another innocent
party's mail relay to send the messages, and using another throw-away
account for their return address (if, of course, they have any intention
of receiving e-mail at all.) 

Much spam is already sent is this manner, so we know from painful
experience that this will make them harder to filter, and it will place
even MORE of a burden on innocent ISPs. 

Therefore, it is now more important than ever before for every Internet
                                                        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
service provider -- as well as anybody else who has mail servers open to
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
the Internet -- to immediately implement as many techniques as possible to
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
stop this abuse of both their and other people's resources.  Some common
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
techniques for accomplishing this can be found at
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
<http://spam.abuse.net/>. 

It is also incumbent upon all of us to help educate those who do not yet
realize what a problem unsolicited commercial e-mail has become.  As
always, this includes our representatives in the government -- on both
state and national levels. 

Some people have already posted that CAUCE is no longer necessary now that
Cyber Promotions has been disconnected from AGIS.  What they do not
realize is that we're not here to fight any single company, or group of
companies.  We're here to stop spam. 

***

ABOUT THIS MESSAGE:

This message was written and broadcast by the Coalition Against
Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail. It is copyrighted (c) 1997 by the Coalition
Against Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail. 

We encourage redistribution of items from this message, as long as they
are not spammed anywhere, are on-topic, and include our copyright notice.
When in doubt, post the URL of our site instead, or put it in your
signature.  Press, broadcast, and Internet media may treat this material
as they would a press release. For other commercial reproduction rights,
contact John Mozena <moz at cauce.org>. 


--
Martha Koester  |         The two most common substances in the
User: eridani   |         universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
Domain: scn.org |                               ---John Taylor

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