The purpose of this page is to talk a bit about my ongoing project to stop getting spam mail anymore.

First of all let me say that I'm in no way saying others should do as I do, since that takes quite a lot of time including the time needed to get some knowledge about how mail is sent and relayed, but on the other hand, from time to time, it's rewarding as well.

My main decision has been to not go the cowards way of "protecting" a mail address of always using a mangled address such as eg. henrik@nospam.iaeste.dk which is a normal thing to do to prevent a program from grabbing the address.

Neither do I go the berserker way of mailboming, nuking or otherwise attempting to "punish" the server the mail apparently came from.
This I don't, both because as a systems operator I can't condone such actions and because the berserkers seldom take the time to figure out exactly what the offending machine was, so tend to wreak havok in all the wrong places.

Instead I try to go the active way of educating administrators of open relays about the problems their wrongly configured software are causing.
that, and immediately telling the provider about a user's abuse are the only responsible responses to spam mail.

As a systems administrator, I have another way of helping to stop spammail and that is by making sure all mailers I'm administrating is using both the MAPS Realtime Blackhole List and ORBS, two registrars of servers involved in spamming, though because of their different philosophies they have different criteria for registering servers.
MAPS registers adresses that have been involved with willful spamming, and whose admin's haven't show any inclination to stop spamming from them.
ORBS on the other hand is entirely about open mail relays, having a machine that's open for relaying is enough to get in the registry, closing the relay is enough to get out. This is almost entirely about stopping third person relays and is essentially the big stick.

Unfortunately, the ORBS check stopped the mail from several people IAESTE does business with and management panic'ed, so instead of taking the time to put those on a positive-list, I ended up being told to remove the check altogether.

This is also a bit unfortunate for the spammers and the people having open relays, since that means I have to actively pursue getting them on the MAPS RBL list instead of simply makind do with entering them in ORBS as I could earlier.

Stories so far

I didn't start collecting this list until early 1999, so several success stories have been lost.
Due to the problems with the politics surrounding the filtering, I've had a one year break from putting things on this list, but a recent surge in the number of SPAM messages I receive has caused me to start this again.