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Network Working Group S. Hambridge Request for Comments: 2635 INTEL FYI: 35 A. Lunde Category: Informational Northwestern University

                                                          June 1999
                             DON'T SPEW
              A Set of Guidelines for Mass Unsolicited
                   Mailings and Postings (spam*)

Status of this Memo

 This memo provides information for the Internet community.  It does
 not specify an Internet standard of any kind.  Distribution of this
 memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

 Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1999).  All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

 This document explains why mass unsolicited electronic mail messages
 are harmful in the Internetworking community.  It gives a set of
 guidelines for dealing with unsolicited mail for users, for system
 administrators, news administrators, and mailing list managers.  It
 also makes suggestions Internet Service Providers might follow.

1. Introduction

 The Internet's origins in the Research and Education communities
 played an important role in the foundation and formation of Internet
 culture.  This culture defined rules for network etiquette
 (netiquette) and communication based on the Internet's being
 relatively off-limits to commercial enterprise.
 This all changed when U.S. Government was no longer the primary
 funding body for the U.S. Internet, when the Internet truly went
 global, and when all commercial enterprises were allowed to join what
 had been strictly research networks.  Internet culture had become
 deeply embedded in the protocols the network used.  Although the
 social context has changed, the technical limits of the Internet
 protocols still require a person to enforce certain limits on
 resource usage for the 'Net to function effectively.  Strong
 authentication was not built into the News and Mail protocols.  The
 only thing that is saving the Internet from congestion collapse is
 the voluntary inclusion of TCP backoff in almost all of the TCP/IP

Hambridge & Lunde Informational [Page 1] RFC 2635 DON'T SPEW June 1999

 driver code on the Internet.  There is no end-to-end cost accounting
 and/or cost recovery.  Bandwidth is shared among all traffic without
 resource reservation (although this is changing).
 Unfortunately for all of us, the culture so carefully nurtured
 through the early years of the Internet was not fully transferred to
 all those new entities hooking into the bandwidth.  Many of those
 entities believe they have found a paradise of thousands of potential
 customers each of whom is desperate to learn about stunning new
 business opportunities.  Alternatively, some of the new netizens
 believe all people should at least hear about the one true religion
 or political party or process.  And some of them know that almost no
 one wants to hear their message but just can't resist how inexpensive
 the net can be to use.  While there may be thousands of folks
 desperate for any potential message, mass mailings or Netnews
 postings are not at all appropriate on the 'Net.
 This document explains why mass unsolicited email and Netnews posting
 (aka spam) is bad, what to do if you get it, what webmasters,
 postmasters, and news admins can do about it, and how an Internet
 Service Provider might respond to it.

2. What is Spam*?

 The term "spam" as it is used to denote mass unsolicited mailings or
 netnews postings is derived from a Monty Python sketch set in a
 movie/tv studio cafeteria.  During that sketch, the word "spam" takes
 over each item offered on the menu until the entire dialogue consists
 of nothing but "spam spam spam spam spam spam and spam."  This so
 closely resembles what happens when mass unsolicited mail and posts
 take over mailing lists and netnews groups that the term has been
 pushed into common usage in the Internet community.
 When unsolicited mail is sent to a mailing list and/or news group it
 frequently generates more hate mail to the list or group or apparent
 sender by people who do not realize the true source of the message.
 If the mailing contains suggestions for removing your name from a
 mailing list, 10s to 100s of people will respond to the list with
 "remove" messages meant for the originator.  So, the original message
 (spam) creates more unwanted mail (spam spam spam spam), which
 generates more unwanted mail (spam spam spam spam spam spam and
 spam).  Similar occurrences are perpetrated in newsgroups, but this
 is held somewhat in check by "cancelbots" (programs which cancel
 postings) triggered by mass posting.  Recently, cancelbots have grown
 less in favor with those administering News servers since the
 cancelbots are now generating the same amount of traffic as spam.
 Even News admins are beginning to use filters, demonstrating that
 spam spam spam spam spam spam and spam is a monumental problem.

Hambridge & Lunde Informational [Page 2] RFC 2635 DON'T SPEW June 1999

3. Why Mass Mailing is Bad

 In the world of paper mail we're all used to receiving unsolicited
 circulars, advertisements, and catalogs.  Generally we don't object
 to this - we look at what we find of interest, and we discard/recycle
 the rest.  Why should receiving unsolicited email be any different?
 The answer is that the cost model is different.  In the paper world,
 the cost of mailing is borne by the sender.  The sender must pay for
 the privilege of creating the ad and the cost of mailing it to the
 recipient.  An average paper commercial mailing in the U.S.  ends up
 costing about $1.00 per addressee.  In the world of electronic
 communications, the recipient bears the majority of the cost.  Yes,
 the sender still has to compose the message and the sender has to pay
 for Internet connectivity.  However, the recipient ALSO has to pay
 for Internet connectivity and possibly also connect time charges and
 for disk space. For electronic mailings the recipient is expected to
 help share the cost of the mailing.  Bulk Internet mail from the U.S.
 ends up costing the sender only about 1/100th of a cent per address;
 or FOUR ORDERS of magnitude LESS than bulk paper mailings!
 Of course, this cost model is very popular with those looking for
 cheap methods to get their message out.  By the same token, it's very
 unpopular with people who have to pay for their messages just to find
 that their mailbox is full of junk mail.  Neither do they appreciate
 being forced to spend time learning how to filter out unwanted
 messages.  Consider this: if you had to pay for receiving paper mail
 would you pay for junk mail?
 Another consideration is that the increase in volume of spam will
 have an impact on the viability of electronic mail as a
 communications medium.  If, when you went to your postal mail box you
 found four crates of mail, would you be willing to search through the
 crates for the one or two pieces of mail which were not advertising?
 Spam has a tremendous potential to create this scenario in the
 electronic world.
 Frequently spammers indulge in unethical behavior such as using mail
 servers which allow mail to be relayed to send huge amounts of
 electronic solicitations.  Or they forge their headers to make it
 look as if the mail originates from a different domain.  These people
 don't care that they're intruding into a personal or business mailbox
 nor do they care that they are using other people's resources without
 compensating them.
 The huge cost difference has other bad effects.  Since even a very
 cheap paper mailing is going to cost tens of (U.S.) cents there is a
 real incentive to send only to those really likely to be interested.

Hambridge & Lunde Informational [Page 3] RFC 2635 DON'T SPEW June 1999

 So paper bulk mailers frequently pay a premium to get high quality
 mailing lists, carefully prune out bad addresses and pay for services
 to update old addresses.  Bulk email is so cheap that hardly anyone
 sending it bothers to do any of this.  As a result, the chance that
 the receiver is actually interested in the mail is very, very, very
 low.
 As of the date of this document, it is a daily event on the Internet
 for a mail service to melt-down due to an overload of spam.  Every
 few months this happens to a large/major/regional/
 national/international service provider resulting in denial of or
 severe degradation of service to hundreds of thousands of users.
 Such service degradations usually prompt the providers to spend
 hundreds of thousands of dollars upgrading their mail service
 equipment just because of the volume of spam.  Service providers pass
 those costs on to customers.
 Doesn't the U.S. Constitution guarantee the ability to say whatever
 one likes?  First, the U.S. Constitution is law only in the U.S., and
 the Internet is global.  There are places your mail will reach where
 free speech is not a given.  Second, the U.S. Constitution does NOT
 guarantee one the right to say whatever one likes.  In general, the
 U.S. Constitution refers to political freedom of speech and not to
 commercial freedom of speech. Finally, and most importantly, the U.S.
 Constitution DOES NOT guarantee the right to seize the private
 property of others in order to broadcast your speech.  The Internet
 consists of a vast number of privately owned networks in voluntary
 cooperation.  There are laws which govern other areas of electronic
 communication, namely the "junk fax" laws.  Although these have yet
 to be applied to electronic mail they are still an example of the
 "curbing" of "free speech."  Free speech does not, in general,
 require other people to spend their money and resources to deliver or
 accept your message.
 Most responsible Internet citizens have come to regard unsolicited
 mail/posts as "theft of service".  Since the recipient must pay for
 the service and for the most part the mail/posts are advertisements
 of unsolicited "stuff" (products, services, information) those
 receiving it believe that the practice of making the recipient pay
 constitutes theft.
 The crux of sending large amounts of unsolicited mail and news is not
 a legal issue so much as an ethical one.  If you are tempted to send
 unsolicited "information" ask yourself these questions: "Whose
 resources is this using?"  "Did they consent in advance?"  "What
 would happen if everybody (or a very large number of people) did
 this?" "How would you feel if 90% of the mail you received was
 advertisements for stuff you didn't want?" "How would you feel if 95%

Hambridge & Lunde Informational [Page 4] RFC 2635 DON'T SPEW June 1999

 of the mail you received was advertisements for stuff you didn't
 want?"  "How would you feel if 99% of the mail you received was
 advertisements for stuff you didn't want?"
 Although numbers on the volume and rate of increase of spam are not
 easy to find, seat-of-the-pants estimates from the people on spam
 discussion mailing lists [1] indicate that unsolicited mail/posts
 seems to be following the same path of exponential growth as the
 Internet as a whole [2].  This is NOT encouraging, as this kind of
 increase puts a strain on servers, connections, routers, and the
 bandwidth of the Internet as a whole.  On a per person basis,
 unsolicited mail is also on the increase, and individuals also have
 to bear the increasing cost of increasing numbers of unsolicited and
 unwanted mail.  People interested in hard numbers may want to point
 their web browsers to
 http://www.techweb.com/se/directlink.cgi?INW19980504S0003 where
 Internet Week reports what spam costs.
 Finally, sending large volumes of unsolicited email or posting
 voluminous numbers of Netnews postings is just plain rude.  Consider
 the following analogy: Suppose you discovered a large party going on
 in a house on your block.  Uninvited, you appear, then join each
 group in conversation, force your way in, SHOUT YOUR OPINION (with a
 megaphone) of whatever you happen to be thinking about at the time,
 drown out all other conversation, then scream "discrimination" when
 folks tell you you're being rude.
 To continue the party analogy, suppose instead of forcing your way
 into each group you stood on the outskirts a while and listened to
 the conversation.  Then you gradually began to add comments relevant
 to the discussion.  Then you began to tell people your opinion of the
 issues they were discussing; they would probably be less inclined to
 look badly on your intrusion.  Note that you are still intruding.
 And that it would still be considered rude to offer to sell products
 or services to the guests even if the products and services were
 relevant to the discussion.  You are in the wrong venue and you need
 to find the right one.
 Lots of spammers act as if their behavior can be forgiven by
 beginning their messages with an apology, or by personalizing their
 messages with the recipient's real name, or by using a number of
 ingratiating techniques.  But much like the techniques used by Uriah
 Heep in Dickens' _David Copperfield_, these usually have an effect
 opposite to the one intended.  Poor excuses ("It's not illegal,"
 "This will be the only message you receive," "This is an ad," "It's
 easy to REMOVE yourself from our list") are still excuses.  Moreover,
 they are likely to make the recipient MORE aggravated rather than

Hambridge & Lunde Informational [Page 5] RFC 2635 DON'T SPEW June 1999

 less aggravated.
 In particular, there are two very severe problems with believing that
 a "remove" feature to stop future mail helps: (1) Careful tests have
 been done with sending remove requests for "virgin" email accounts
 (that have never been used anywhere else).  In over 80% of the cases,
 this resulted in a deluge of unsolicited email, although usually from
 other sources than the one the remove was sent to.  In other words,
 if you don't like unsolicited mail, you should think carefully before
 using a remove feature because the evidence is that it will result in
 more mail not less.  (2) Even if it did work, it would not stop lots
 of new unsolicited email every day from new businesses that hadn't
 mailed before.

4a. ACK! I've Been Spammed - Now What?

 It's unpleasant to receive mail which you do not want.  It's even
 more unpleasant if you're paying for connect time to download it.
 And it's really unpleasant to receive mail on topics which you find
 offensive.  Now that you're good and mad, what's an appropriate
 response?
 First, you always have the option to delete it and get on with your
 life.  This is the easiest and safest response.  It does not
 guarantee you won't get more of the same in the future, but it does
 take care of the current problem.  Also, if you do not read your mail
 on a regular basis it is possible that your complaint is much too
 late to do any good.
 Second, consider strategies that take advantage of screening
 technology.  You might investigate technologies that allow you to
 filter unwanted mail before you see it.  Some software allows you to
 scan subject lines and delete unwanted messages before you download
 them.  Other programs can be configured to download portions of
 messages, check them to see if they are advertising (for example) and
 delete them before the whole message is downloaded.
 Also, your organization or your local Internet Service Provider may
 have the ability to block unwanted mail at their mail relay machines
 and thus spare you the hassle of dealing with it at all.  It is worth
 inquiring about this possibility if you are the victim of frequent
 spam.
 Your personal mailer software may allow you to write rules defining
 what you do and do not wish to read.  If so, write a rule which sends
 mail from the originator of the unwanted mail to the trash.  This
 will work if one sender or site repeatedly bothers you.  You may also
 consider writing other rules based on other headers if you are sure

Hambridge & Lunde Informational [Page 6] RFC 2635 DON'T SPEW June 1999

 the probability of them being activated for non-spam is low enough.
 That way, although you may still have to pay to download it, you
 won't have to read it!
 Third, you may consider sending the mail back to the originator
 objecting to your being on the mailing-list; however, we recommend
 against this.  First, a lot of spammers disguise who they are and
 where their mail comes from by forging the mail headers.  Unless you
 are very experienced at reading headers discovering the true origin
 of the mail will probably prove difficult.  Although you can engage
 your local support staff to help you with this, they may have much
 higher priorities (such as setting up site-wide filters to prevent
 spam from entering the site).  Second, responding to this email will
 simply verify your address as valid and make your address more
 valuable for other (ab)uses (as was mentioned above in Section 3).
 Third, even if the two previous things do not happen, very probably
 your mail will be directed to the computer equivalent of a black hole
 (the bit-bucket).
 As of the writing of this document, there are several pieces of
 pending legislation in several jurisdictions about the sending of
 unsolicited mail and also about forging headers.  If forging of
 headers should become illegal, then responding to the sender is less
 risky and may be useful.
 Certainly we advocate communicating to the originator (as best as you
 can tell) to let them know you will NOT be buying any products from
 them as you object to the method they have chosen to conduct their
 business (aka spam).  Most responses through media other than
 electronic mail (mostly by those who take the time to phone included
 "800" (free to calling party in the U.S.) phone numbers) have proved
 somewhat effective.  You can also call the business the advertisement
 is for, ask to speak to someone in authority, and then tell them you
 will never buy their products or use their services because their
 advertising mechanism is spam.
 Next, you can carbon copy or forward the questionable mail messages
 or news postings to your postmaster.  You can do this by sending mail
 "To: Postmaster@your-site.example."  Your postmaster should be an
 expert at reading mail headers and will be able to tell if the
 originating address is forged.  He or she may be able to pinpoint the
 real culprit and help close down the site.  If your postmaster wants
 to know about unsolicited mail, be sure s/he gets a copy, including
 headers.  You will need to find out the local policy and comply.

Hambridge & Lunde Informational [Page 7] RFC 2635 DON'T SPEW June 1999

  • IMPORTANT *
 Wherever you send a complaint, be sure to include the full headers
 (most mail and news programs don't display the full headers by
 default).  For mail it is especially important to show the
 "Received:" headers.  For Usenet news, it is the "Path:" header.
 These normally show the route by which the mail or news was
 delivered.  Without them, it's impossible to even begin to tell where
 the message originated.  See the appendix for an example of a mail
 header.
 There is lively and ongoing debate about the validity of changing
 one's email address in a Web Browser in order to have Netnews posts
 and email look as if it is originating from some spot other than
 where it does originate.  The reasoning behind this is that web email
 address harvesters will not be getting a real address when it
 encounters these.  There is reason on both sides of this debate: If
 you change your address, you will not be as visible to the
 harvesters, but if you change your address, real people who need to
 contact you will be cut off as well.  Also, if you are using the
 Internet through an organization such as a company, the company may
 have policies about "forging" addresses - even your own!  Most people
 agree that the consequences of changing your email address on your
 browser or even in your mail headers is fairly dangerous and will
 nearly guarantee your mail goes into a black hole unless you are very
 sure you know what you are doing.
 Finally, DO NOT respond by sending back large volumes of unsolicited
 mail.  Two wrongs do not make a right; do not become your enemy; and
 take it easy on the network.  While the legal status of spam is
 uncertain, the legal status (at least in the U.S.) of a "mail bomb"
 (large numbers and/or sizes of messages to the site with the intent
 of disabling or injuring the site) is pretty clear: it is criminal.
 There is a web site called "www.abuse.net" which allows you to
 register, then send your message to the name of the "offending-
 domain@abuse.net," which will re-mail your message to the best
 reporting address for the offending domain.  The site contains good
 tips for reporting abuse netnews or email messages.  It also has some
 automated tools that you may download to help you filter your
 messages.  Also check CIAC bulletin I-005 at:
    http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/bulletins/i-005c.shtml
 or at:
    http://spam.abuse.net/spam/tools/mailblock.html.

Hambridge & Lunde Informational [Page 8] RFC 2635 DON'T SPEW June 1999

 Check the Appendix for a detailed explanation of tools and
 methodology to use when trying to chase down a spammer.

4b. There's a Spam in My Group!

 Netnews is also subject to spamming.  Here several factors help to
 mitigate against the propagation of spam in news, although they don't
 entirely solve the problem.  Newsgroups and mailing lists may be
 moderated, which means that a moderator approves all mail/posts.  If
 this is the case, the moderator usually acts as a filter to remove
 unwanted and off-topic posts/mail.
 In Netnews there are programs which detect posts which have been sent
 to multiple groups or which detect multiple posts from the same
 source to one group.  These programs cancel the posts.  While these
 work and keep unsolicited posts down, they are not 100% effective and
 spam in newsgroups seems to be growing at an even faster rate than
 spam in mail or on mailing lists.  After all, it's much easier to
 post to a newsgroup for which there are thousands of readers than it
 is to find individual email addresses for all those folks.  Hence the
 development of the "cancelbots" (sometimes called "cancelmoose") for
 Netnews groups.  Cancelbots are triggered when one message is sent to
 a large number of newsgroups or when many small messages are sent
 (from one sender) to the same newsgroup.  In general these are tuned
 to the "Breidbart Index" [3] which is a somewhat fuzzy measure of the
 interactions of the number of posts and number of groups.  This is
 fuzzy purposefully, so that people will not post a number of messages
 just under the index and still "get away with it."  And as noted
 above, the cancel messages have reached such a volume now that a lot
 of News administrators are beginning to write filters rather than
 send cancels.  Still spam gets through, so what can a concerned
 netizen do?
 If there is a group moderator, make sure s/he knows that off-topic
 posts are slipping into the group.  If there is no moderator, you
 could take the same steps for dealing with news as are recommended
 for mail with all the same caveats.
 A reasonable printed reference one might obtain has been published by
 O'Reilly and Associates, _Stopping Spam_, by Alan Schwartz and Simson
 Garfinkel [4].  This book also has interesting histories of spammers
 such as Cantor and Siegel, and Jeff Slaton.  It gives fairly clear
 instructions for filtering mail and news.

Hambridge & Lunde Informational [Page 9] RFC 2635 DON'T SPEW June 1999

5. Help for Beleaguered Admins

 As a system administrator, news administrator, local Postmaster, or
 mailing-list administrator, your users will come to you for help in
 dealing with unwanted mail and posts.  First, find out what your
 institution's policy is regarding unwanted/unsolicited mail.  It is
 possible that it won't do anything for you, but it is also possible
 to use it to justify blocking a domain which is sending particularly
 offensive mail to your users.  If you don't have a clear policy, it
 would be really useful to create one.  If you are a mailing-list
 administrator, make sure your mailing-list charter forbids off-topic
 posts. If your internal-only newsgroups are getting spammed from the
 outside of your institution, you probably have bigger security
 problems than just spam.
 Make sure that your mail and news transports are configured to reject
 messages injected by parties outside your domain.  Recently
 misconfigured Netnews servers have become subject to hijacking by
 spammers.  SMTP source routing <@relay.host:user@dest.host> is
 becoming deprecated due to its overwhelming abuse by spammers.  You
 should configure your mail transport to reject relayed messages (when
 neither the sender nor the recipient are within your domain).  Check:
                       http://www.sendmail.org/
 under the "Anti-Spam" heading.
 If you run a firewall at your site, it can be configured in ways to
 discourage spam.  For example, if your firewall is a gateway host
 that itself contains an NNTP server, ensure that it is configured so
 it does not allow access from external sites except your news feeds.
 If your firewall acts as a proxy for an external news-server, ensure
 that it does not accept NNTP connections other than from your
 internal network.  Both these potential holes have recently been
 exploited by spammers.  Ensure that email messages generated within
 your domain have proper identity information in the headers, and that
 users cannot forge headers.  Be sure your headers have all the
 correct information as stipulated by RFC 822 [5] and RFC 1123 [6].
 If you are running a mailing-list, allowing postings only by
 subscribers means a spammer would actually have to join your list
 before sending spam messages, which is unlikely.  Make sure your
 charter forbids any off-topic posts.  There is another spam-related
 problem with mailing-lists which is that spammers like to retaliate
 on those who work against them by mass-subscribing their enemies to
 mailing-lists.  Your mailing-list software should require
 confirmation of the subscription, and only then should the address be
 subscribed.

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 It is possible, if you are running a mail transfer agent that allows
 it, to block persistant offending sites from ever getting mail into
 your site.  However, careful consideration should be taken before
 taking that step.  For example, be careful not to block out sites for
 which you run MX records!  In the long run, it may be most useful to
 help your users learn enough about their mailers so that they can
 write rules to filter their own mail, or provide rules and kill files
 for them to use, if they so choose.
 There is information about how to configure sendmail available at
 "www.sendmail.org."  Help is also available at "spam.abuse.net."
 Another good strategy is to use Internet tools such as whois and
 traceroute to find which ISP is serving your problem site.  Notify
 the postmaster or abuse (abuse@offending-domain.example) address that
 they have an offender.  Be sure to pass on all header information in
 your messages to help them with tracking down the offender.  If they
 have a policy against using their service to post unsolicited mail
 they will need more than just your say-so that there is a problem.
 Also, the "originating" site may be a victim of the offender as well.
 It's not unknown for those sending this kind of mail to bounce their
 mail through dial-up accounts, or off unprotected mail servers at
 other sites.  Use caution and courtesy in your approach to those who
 look like the offender.
 News spammers use similar techniques for sending spam to the groups.
 They have been known to forge headers and bounce posts off "open"
 news machines and remailers to cover their tracks.  During the height
 of the infamous David Rhodes "Make Money Fast" posts, it was not
 unheard of for students to walk away from terminals which were logged
 in, and for sneaky folks to then use their accounts to forge posts,
 much to the later embarrassment of both the student and the
 institution.
 One way to lessen problems is to avoid using mail-to URLs on your web
 pages.  They allow email addresses to be easily harvested by those
 institutions grabbing email addresses off the web.  If you need to
 have an email address prevalent on a web page, consider using a cgi
 script to generate the mailto address.
 Participate in mailing lists and news groups which discuss
 unsolicited mail/posts and the problems associated with it.
 News.admin.net-abuse.misc is probably the most well-known of these.

Hambridge & Lunde Informational [Page 11] RFC 2635 DON'T SPEW June 1999

6. What's an ISP to Do

 As an Internet Service Provider, you first and foremost should decide
 what your stance against unsolicited mail and posts will be.  If you
 decide not to tolerate unsolicited mail, write a clear Acceptable Use
 Policy which states your position and delineates consequences for
 abuse.  If you state that you will not tolerate use of your resource
 for unsolicited mail/posts, and that the consequence will be loss of
 service, you should be able to cancel offending accounts relatively
 quickly (after verifying that the account really IS being mis-used).
 If you have downstreaming arrangements with other providers, you
 should make sure they are aware of any policy you set.  Likewise, you
 should be aware of your upstream providers' policies.
 Consider limiting access for dialup accounts so they cannot be used
 by those who spew.  Make sure your mail servers aren't open for mail
 to be bounced off them (except for legitimate users).  Make sure your
 mail transfer agents are the most up-to-date version (which pass
 security audits) of the software.
 Educate your users about how to react to spew and spewers.  Make sure
 instructions for writing rules for mailers are clear and available.
 Support their efforts to deal with unwanted mail at the local level -
 taking some of the burden from your system administrators.
 Make sure you have an address for abuse complaints.  If complainers
 can routinely send mail to "abuse@BigISP.example" and you have
 someone assigned to read that mail, workflow will be much smoother.
 Don't require people complaining about spam to use some unique local
 address for complaints.  Read and use 'postmaster' and 'abuse'.  We
 recommend adherence to RFC 2142, _Mailbox Names for Common Services,
 Roles and Functions._ [7].
 Finally, write your contracts and terms and conditions in such
 language that allows you to suspend service for offenders, and so
 that you can impose a charge on them for your costs in handling the
 complaints their abuse generates and/or terminating their account and
 cleaning up the mess they make.  Some large ISPs have found that they
 can fund much of their abuse prevention staff by imposing such
 charges.  Make sure all your customers sign the agreement before
 their accounts are activated.  There is a list of "good" Acceptable
 Use Policies and Terms of Service at:
              http://spam.abuse.net/goodsites/index.html.
 Legally, you may be able to stop spammers and spam relayers, but this
 is certainly dependent on the jurisdictions involved.  Potentially,
 the passing of spam via third party computers, especially if the

Hambridge & Lunde Informational [Page 12] RFC 2635 DON'T SPEW June 1999

 headers are forged, could be a criminal action depending on the laws
 of the particular jurisdiction(s) involved.  If your site is being
 used as a spam relay, be sure to contact local and national criminal
 law enforcement agencies.  Site operators may also want to consider
 bringing civil actions against the spammer for expropriation of
 property, in particular the computer time and network bandwidth.  In
 addition, when a mailing list is involved, there is a potential
 intellectual property rights violation.
 There are a few law suits in the courts now which claim spammers
 interfered with and endangered network connectivity.  At least one
 company is attempting to charge spammers for the use of its networks
 (www.kclink.com/spam/).

7. Security Considerations

 Certain actions to stop spamming may cause problems to legitimate
 users of the net. There is a risk that filters to stop spamming will
 unintentionally stop legitimate mail too. Overloading postmasters
 with complaints about spamming may cause trouble to the wrong person,
 someone who is not responsible for and cannot do anything to avoid
 the spamming activity, or it may cause trouble out of proportion to
 the abuse you are complaining about.  Be sure to exercise discretion
 and good judgment in all these cases.  Check your local escalation
 procedure.  The Site Security Handbook [2] can help define an
 escalation procedure if your site does not have one defined.
 Lower levels of network security interact with the ability to trace
 spam via logs or message headers.  Measures to stop various sorts of
 DNS and IP spoofing can make this information more reliable.
 Spammers can and will exploit obvious security weaknesses, especially
 in NNTP servers.  This can lead to denial of service, either from the
 sheer volume of posts, or as a result of action taken by upstream
 providers.

8. Acknowledgments

 Thanks for help from the IETF-RUN working group, and also to all the
 spew-fighters.  Specific thanks are due to J.D. Falk, whose very
 helpful Anti-spam FAQ proved valuable.  Thanks are also due to the
 vigilance of Scott Hazen Mueller and Paul Vixie, who run
 spam.abuse.net, the Anti-spam web site.  Thanks also to Jacob Palme,
 Chip Rosenthal, Karl Auerbach for specific text: Jacob for the
 Security Considerations section, Chip for the configuration
 suggestions in section 5, Karl for the legal considerations.  Andrew
 Gierth was very helpful with Netnews spam considerations.  And thanks
 to Gary Malkin for proofing and formatting.

Hambridge & Lunde Informational [Page 13] RFC 2635 DON'T SPEW June 1999

9. References

 [1] See for example spam-l@peach.ease.lsoft.com
 [2] Fraser, B., "Site Security Handbook", FYI 8, RFC 2196, September
     1997.
 [3] "Current Spam thresholds and guidelines," Lewis, Chris and Tim
     Skirvin, http://www.killfile.org/~tskirvin/faqs/spam.html.
 [4] Schwartz, Alan and Simson Garfinkel, "Stopping Spam," O'Reilly
     and Associates, 1998.
 [5] Crocker, D., "Standard for the format of ARPA Internet text
     messages", STD 11, RFC 822, August 1982.
 [6] Braden, R., "Requirements for Internet hosts - application and
     support", STD 3, RFC 1123, October 1989.
 [7] Crocker, D., "Mailbox Names for Common Services, Roles and
     Functions", RFC 2142, May 1997.
  • Spam is a name of a meat product made by Hormel. "spam" (no

capitalization) is routinely used to describe unsolicited bulk

   email and netnews posts.

Hambridge & Lunde Informational [Page 14] RFC 2635 DON'T SPEW June 1999

10. Appendix - How to Track Down Spammers

 In a large proportion of spams today, complaining to the postmaster
 of the site that is the apparent sender of a message will have little
 effect because either the headers are forged to disguise the source
 of the message, or the senders of the message run their own
 system/domain, or both.
 As a result, it may be necessary to look carefully at the headers of
 a message to see what parts are most reliable, and/or to complain to
 the second or third-level Internet providers who provide Internet
 service to a problem domain.
 In many cases, getting reports with full headers from various
 recipients of a spam can help locate the source. In extreme cases of
 header forgery, only examination of logs on multiple systems can
 trace the source of a message.
 With only one message in hand, one has to make an educated guess as
 to the source. The following are only rough guidelines.
 In the case of mail messages, "Received:" headers added by systems
 under control of the destination organization are most likely to be
 reliable. You can't trust what the source domain calls itself, but
 you can usually use the source IP address since that is determined by
 the destination domain's server.
 In naive mail forgeries, the "Message-ID:" header may show the first
 SMTP server to handle the message and/or the "Received:" headers may
 all be accurate, but neither can be relied on.  Be especially wary
 when the Received: headers have other headers intermixed.  Normally,
 Received: headers are all together in a block, and when split up, one
 or the other blocks is probably forged.
 In the case of news messages, some part of the Path: header may be a
 forgery; only reports from multiple sites can make this clear.  In
 naive news forgeries, the "NNTP-Posting-Host:" header shows the
 actual source, but this can be forged too.
 If a spam message advertises an Internet server like a WWW site, that
 server must be connected to the network to be usable.  Therefore that
 address can be traced.  It is appropriate to complain to the ISP
 hosting a web site advertised in a SPAM, even if the origin of the
 spam seems to be elsewhere.  Be aware that the spam could be an
 attack on the advertised site; the perpetrator knows the site will be
 deluged with complaints and their reputation will be damaged.  Any
 spam with an electronic address in it is suspect because most
 spammers know they're unwelcome and won't make themselves accessible.

Hambridge & Lunde Informational [Page 15] RFC 2635 DON'T SPEW June 1999

 Here is an example mail header:

From friendlymail@209.214.12.258.com Thu Feb 26 20:32:47 1998 Received: from clio.sc.intel.com by Ludwig.sc.intel.com (4.1/SMI-4.1)

      id AA05377; Thu, 26 Feb 98 20:32:46 PST

Received: from 209.214.12.258.com (209.214.12.258.com [208.26.102.16])

      by clio.sc.intel.com (8.8.6/8.8.5) with ESMTP id UAA29637
      for <sallyh@intel.com>; Thu, 26 Feb 1998 20:33:30 -0800 (PST)

Received: ok X-Sender: promo1@gotosportsbook.com X-Advertisement: <a href="http://www.opt-out.com"> Click here to be removed. Date: Thu, 26 Feb 1998 23:23:03 -0500 From: Sent By promo1@gotosportsbook.com Reply-To: Sent By promo1@gotosportsbook.com To: friend@bulkmailer Subject: Ad: FREE $50 in Sportsbook & Casino X-Mailer: AK-Mail 3.0b [eng] (unregistered) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: friendlymail@aqua.258.com Message-Id: bulk.6508.19980226232535@aqua.258.com Status: R


 Doing a traceroute on an IP address or DNS address will show what
 domains provide IP connectivity from you to that address.
 Using whois and nslookup, one can try to determine who is
 administratively responsible for a domain.
 In simple cases, a user of a responsible site may be exploiting an
 account or a weakness in dial-up security; in those cases a complaint
 to a single site may be sufficient. However, it may be appropriate to
 complain to more than one domain, especially when it looks like the
 spammers run their own system.
 If you look at the traceroute to an address, you will normally see a
 series of domains between you and that address, with one or more
 wide-area/national Internet Service Providers in the middle and
 "smaller" networks/domains on either end. It may be appropriate to
 complain to the domains nearer the source, up to and including the
 closest wide-area ISP.  However, this is a judgement call.
 If an intermediate site appears to be a known, responsible domain,
 stopping your complaints at this point makes sense.

Hambridge & Lunde Informational [Page 16] RFC 2635 DON'T SPEW June 1999

Authors' Information

 Sally Hambridge
 Intel Corp, SC11-321
 2200 Mission College blvd
 Santa Clara, CA 95052
 EMail: sallyh@ludwig.sc.intel.com
 Albert Lunde
 Northwestern University
 Suite 1400
 1603 Orrington Avenue
 Evanston, IL 60201
 EMail: Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu

Hambridge & Lunde Informational [Page 17] RFC 2635 DON'T SPEW June 1999

Full Copyright Statement

 Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1999).  All Rights Reserved.
 This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
 others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
 or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published
 and distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any
 kind, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
 included on all such copies and derivative works.  However, this
 document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
 the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
 Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of
 developing Internet standards in which case the procedures for
 copyrights defined in the Internet Standards process must be
 followed, or as required to translate it into languages other than
 English.
 The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
 revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.
 This document and the information contained herein is provided on an
 "AS IS" basis and THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET ENGINEERING
 TASK FORCE DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING
 BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE INFORMATION
 HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
 MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Acknowledgement

 Funding for the RFC Editor function is currently provided by the
 Internet Society.

Hambridge & Lunde Informational [Page 18]

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