Spam abuse

From Computer Tyme Support Wiki

Latest revision as of 14:21, 11 October 2011

Possible Spam Abuse Report

Welcome to Junk Email Filter. You are here because you received one of our spam abuse notification messages. We send out these messages as a courtesy to alert admins, like yourself, about possible problems that you might not be aware of. Our intent is not to complain as much as it is to inform you of a possible problem that you might want to look into. Many people find this report useful and are able to fix virus infected computers, find out a customer was hacked, or be alerted that someone is abusing their system.

Sometime we get it wrong and if we do we want to know about it. It is somewhat of a bold move for us sending this automated report in that people can see when we screw up. However if we screw up we want to know that so we can fix it. Our goal is to get it right. We are all on the same team here. We're all trying to get rid of spam.

When you look at the abuse report note that some times we are alerting you because you are on some other list we use to block spam. An example is if your message contained a link that is a blacklisted link. If that is the case then there will be information in the message telling you where to go to get your link removed. That will not only fix your problem with us but also keep your email from bouncing from other systems that use the same blacklists that we do.

Have you been blacklisted? To be removed Click Here

Message Blocked due to Other Lists

One thing to watch is the reason given for the abuse report. Junk Email Filter relies on other block lists in part to determine what is spam. Although we pick lists that we consider to be reliable, everyone gets it wrong sometimes. If you are listed on one of these other lists then contacting us about it won't solve the problem. Even if we whitelisted you your email will still bounce on other servers that rely on the same lists we use. If you contact the list that caused the bounce then you can get cleard at the sounce.

Getting White Listed or Yellow Listed

We are always looking for opportunities to white list or yellow list email sources on our Spam_DNS_Lists. These lists prevent a lot of false positives and allow email to pass through our filters faster and reduce load on our system.

Yellow listing is a term we invented. A yellow listed server is a mail server that sends out some spam. These would be services like Yahoo, Hotmail, and ISPs who try to get rid of outgoing spam but can't catch it all. If you are yellow listed we will never black list you and we don't check other lists to see if you are blacklisted.

Our listing system is based on the reverse DNS (RDNS) of the host IP contacting us directly. So if you are sending your corporate email from a host that never sends any spam at all email us with the host name so that we can whitelist it. For example, we list *.wellsfargo.com that ensures that all real email from Wells Fargo Bank gets through even if they change or expand their IP ranges. Additionally when we resolve the host name that matches a name on our list that IP address is added to our IP based whitelisting service which is used by other spam filtering systems. So being whitelisted with us gets you whitelisted on many other systems. Junk Email Filter has one of the world's biggest whitelisting systems.

Similarly, if you are running a server that sends mostly good email but does send some spam then we can put you on our yellow list so that you don't get accidentally blacklisted due to some spam. This helps us prevent false positives.

Replying to our abuse report

You do not need to respond to our reports. They are completely automated and somewhat impersonal. You are welcome to respond if there is something we should know about but you don't need to apologize for being hacked or sending spam.

Getting a Black Listing Cleared

Just because you got a spam notification report doesn't mean that you are blacklisted. If you are mistakenly blacklisted or if you solved the problem that got you blacklisted you can contact us to be removed. We want to get it right and we don't want to block legitimate email.

Blacklisting Only lasts 5 Days

Our blacklisting data only lasts 5 days. So if you fix your problem it will automatically be removed 5 days from the last time we detected the spam.

Controlling who gets the abuse message

You might be wondering why you got the abuse message and if we can send it to a different email address. What we do is extract the domain from the RDNS of the sending host and put abuse@ in front of it by default. However if you sign up at Abuse.net then we will read their info and forward abuse messages there. We can also put our domain on a list so you don't get abuse messages at all.

Outbound Spam Filtering

We are now offering a service for Outbound Spam Filtering. Our service allows you to route your outbound email through us, we filter it, and pass the good email on to the world. It's very accurate in that it doesn't block your good email. How do we do that? Spammer never send email slowly, so we don't have to filter someone who is only sending a few emails an hour. Spammers also tend to have bad lists. So we look at the number of bad email addresses they are sending to.

So - if you got to this wiki page because of an abuse complaint we might be able to fix that.

We want to work with you

We are always looking for new ideas and to form partnerships with people who want to stop spam. Junk Email Filter is an innovative company whit a lot of "outside the box" thinking. We have the most accurate spam filtering technology on the planet. We are looking for new ideas all the time. We would like to partner up with people who process a lot of email who would have a lot of data that could be useful in expanding out IP lists.