Wed Feb 21 17:26:09 PST 2001 — We’re seeing an increase in the amount of SPAM being blocked and also being delivered to Sonic.net customers. We are doing many things here to block as much SPAM as we can. We’ll continue to develop additional methods of blocking in an effort to reduce the clutter in your email inbox.
Remember, do not reply to SPAM with remove requests; this just validates you as a responsive target. Instead, report it in order to shut the spammer down at the source. A great resource for automatically filing SPAM reports is SpamCop at www.spamcop.net/. You may additionally bounce or redirect SPAM with full headers to spam@sonic.net; messages received there are reviewed in order to continue to enhance our own blocking and filters.
Sonic.net uses a number of anti-spam efforts currently, including:
Subscription to the Mail Abuse Protection System (MAPS) “Plus” system, including the Realtime Blackhole List (RBL), Relay Spam Stopper (RSS) and DialUp List (DUL). For info on MAPS, see www.mail-abuse.org/. The majority of inbound SPAM is blocked by this tool.
Rejection of email from invalid sources. Email coming from domains which are not valid (correction) or which are malformed is rejected. Quite a bit of SPAM is sourced from entirely invalid domains, and is blocked by this filter.
Rejection of email from our own internal blacklist of SPAM source domains (1828 domains) and SPAM source email addresses (2592 addresses). These two lists have been generated primarily from user SPAM redirected to spam@sonic.net or posted in news:sonic.spam-can A rather small amount of spam is blocked by these blacklists, as they spammers have generally moved on to new domains or email addresses with each new wave of emails.
For further discussions about SPAM and anti-SPAM efforts, please read and post to news:sonic.spam-can.d
-Dane