Spam Policies

This page is designed to be a definitive place to find out about QSL or QTH NET's spam policies for both email and listserver services. Unfortunately all the currently possible spam hacks are not fool proof, so it is possible that we have accidently made a mistake. So if you have any questions or comments please feel free to direct them to k3tkj@qsl.net and we will do our best to sort out whatever problem may arise.

We also have a page to help teach you about spam. It is relatively basic but is designed to help teach you how to deal with spam in a useful manner and how to minimize the amount of spam that you receive. Some simple rules can help a lot. Here is the Spam FAQ

General Policies

Anti-Relaying Policies

If you are getting an error message similar to what is below you are most likely being effected by our anti-relaying policies. There is now a page dedicated to explaining what this means, and offering some solutions. Please check it out if this is indeed what is effecting you.

550 larry@domain.com... We do not relay see http://www.qsl.net/spampolicy.html

Mail Policies

As spam has become a larger and larger problem on the internet ISP's have been forced to find new and inventive ways to combat it. There are two main components which make spam a bad thing. The first is that having unsolicited email constantly arriving in your mailbox can be very annoying. Especially as the volume of spam increases the longer you've had your email address, and the more widely known your email address is.

The second problem is called relaying. The most common method for spammers to send their spam is to relay off of an unsuspecting (and unprotected) mail host. In this manner a spammer can send a vast volume of email messages (often many millions of messages) to innocent people all over the net.

Now the question is what have we done to reduce the scope of these problems.

• We subscribe to databases of known spam domains and users from whom we will not accept mail. Because this can potentially cause a denial of service to our users you can view a list of bounced mail headers and their meanings from this page.

• If you believe that a domain or user has been listed here incorrectly please contact us and we will do what we can to resolve the problem.

• We only allow people to use our mail servers to sendmail to our users. What this means is that in order for our mail server to relay, the message must be to one of our users. Even when the mail "From:" is a QSL or QTH NET address it DID NOT ORIGINATE from QSL or QTH NET.

Mailing List Policies

Although it recieves less attention these days from most people, spam is also a problem on e-mail "reflector" systems. In order to be good netizens we actively monitor our mailing lists (both what arrives from the world and what our users send out) for spam. Anything which is determined to be spam is filtered immediately.

Unfortunately this process isn't perfect and occasionally we catch a legitimate post. If you are having trouble posting a message to our List server it is most likely because your message is getting caught by one of the rules below:

• You are cross posting your message to more than 25 groups.

• You are posting a follow-up which is more than seven replies deep (typically flame wars).

• You are posting a message with a binary attachment.

• Your post includes mime encapsulated HTML (normally a mistake by new users and considered bad netiquette).

• The post arrived from a blacklisted domain or IP range (this only filters incoming articles).

• Your post was generated by a known software spam package and has been detected by it's headers.

• Based on modified MD5 checksum of an article body, the server will reject anything it sees more than five identical copies of within the last day.

Almost everything we see getting rejected falls into these four categories:

• You must subscribe to a list to post, and you can only post from the address you subscribed from. Another computer, another mail address WILL be rejected.

• Posts from known spam friendly organizations which has been detected by domain, IP number or article headers.

• Since all lists reject HTML posts, you might be interested in the following URL's to check your mail client. Most popular clients are covered.

  www.rootsweb.com/rootsweb/listowners/html-off.htm

  www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1236/nomime.html

• Posts rejected because more than 25 copies of the same article has been posted within the last day. This is one way spammers try to get around the cross post limits, they simply post the same message to many lists a few at a time.

• The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email - http://www.cauce.org/

• Death to Spam! - http://www.mindworkshop.com/alchemy/nospam.html

• abuse.net - http://www.abuse.net/

• spam.abuse.net - http://spam.abuse.net/

If you think that there has been a mistake please feel free to contact us for help at k3tkj@qsl.net .