spam "etiquette" suggestions

[Doug Schuler]

FYI,

Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1998 06:38:57 -0800
From: "cisler" <cisler at pobox.com>
To: AFCNmembers <afcn-members at lists.colorado.edu>
Subject: Why the Internet is not "Free"

We all know that we have a great tool in being able to send and receive
email without thinking much about the cost. Few places outside of North
America have flat rate (or many community networks); it can be pretty
costly. I thought I'd pass on a short piece from a California ISP newsletter
which explained why service was so bad last week for me and others.

I think it shows how delicate the Internet still is and how costly it is to
deal with Spam and mail attacks. The cost is in money, time, and good will.

Steve

---

------------- ----- ---- --- -- -
 Last Week's Email Problems
------------- ----- ---- --- -- -

Last week InReach experienced problems with
Email, where illegal "spam" Email attacks
caused several days of slowdowns and some
periods of Email being unavailable.

We apologize for the inconvenience this caused
for many of our members, and wanted to explain
the causes of the problems, and the steps we are
taking to insure this type of service problem
does not occur again in the future.

Last week we were hit by three "spammers,"
people who illegally send thousands of unsolicited
Email messages. The first occurred on Tuesday morning,
and caused only a moderate slowdown. Unfortunately,
as our server was processing these messages, we
were hit during peak mail usage time Tuesday evening
by another spammer, and then again on Wednesday morning.

These attacks, which sent tens of thousands of
messages to the server in the space of a few minutes,
filled up the server storage space and slowed the
server to a crawl. With each spam attack, the server
not only had to process the thousands of Emails, but
also had to deal with the thousands of messages which
bounced back, sometimes hours after the initial attack.

What InReach is Doing
---------------------
During these attacks, we worked with the ISPs
providing access to the spammers to block the attacks.
Unfortunately, many thousands of messages did get
through before these routes were blocked. We are
establishing new spam recovery procedures, and are
studying countermeasures and working with other
ISPs to prevent these attacks in the future. We
are also attempting to identify those responsible
for these attacks, and may pursue legal action
against these parties.

In addition, we will be dramatically upgrading
our Email hardware in the coming weeks. We will
be installing a new fiber-optic 35 gigabyte disk
array, which will deliver messages more quickly,
and increase our Email capacity greatly, so junk
messages will not be able to fill up our storage
space. We will also be adding a second Email server
in the near future, so one server will process
incoming Email, and the other one will process
outgoing Email, which should also improve performance.

What You Can Do
---------------
There are several things which you, as an InReach
member, can do to help us in our fight against
"spam" or junk Email.

Never reply in any way to a spam message. Simply
delete them or forward them, with the header attached,
to abuse at inreach.com so we can investigate.

Never ask a spammer to remove you from his/her list,
even if they say that they will remove you from the list.
Many illegal Emailers simply use this as a way of
confirming that your Email address is valid, as they
send out millions of unsolicited Emails.

Never get into any heated or abusive dialog in Email,
because it could trigger such an attack or "mail bomb."
It is always best to keep all Email and chat dialogs
polite.

If you experience problems with Email, wait a minute
or two and check again. If it does not go through
but you can get on the web, check our System Status
page under the technical support area. If no updated
information is available on our system status page,
please give us a call, and be sure to listen to the
tech support and member services greeting messages
for information on any system problems.

We welcome your comments and questions regarding
spam and the Email problems we experienced last week.
Again, we apologize for the inconvenience, and are
working hard to ensure that it does not happen again.

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