How Not to Be A Spammer
Simple: don’t send unsolicited e-mail, right? It’s more complex than that. Kelly Jackson Higgins at Dark Reading has a list of suggestions / rules on how not to be labeled as a bad actor. Some are easy: when someone asks not to receive messages anymore, unsubscribe them! Some are more complex: make sure you don’t have forms on your Web site that can be used to launch spam. This last point reminded me of the evolution in spamming. When I worked on this issue at Lotus with my friend / former boss Joe Perry, we worried primarily about open relays – companies failing to limit their mail servers’ willingness to accept and forward mail for any given destination. Companies have gotten better about this, increasing the cost of this trick for spammers, and the ready availability of botnets has provided cheaper and easier tools. Another point to drive home the arms race over unsolicited e-mail and, also, the fact that I’m getting old.
Filed under: ISP, Intermediaries, Internet & Society, Notes, Security, Spam, badware
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