Spam buster • 3 hours ago
ZA spam spotters need to take time to understand the difference between spammy senders and ESPs. We are all for anti-spam practices but they should first get their facts right and not take the cowboy approach.
You have a very valid point.
We are not taking the cowboy approach with this initiative. We have spent a lot of hours studying & discussing amongst ourselves and with other industry experts. This is the current way forward for us.
We are a group of people that are currently employed in the IT industry and specialises in various fields. Some of us run and maintain large mail clusters, work at Internet Service Providers, DBA, web development, engineers; one is with big red mobile provider and so forth. A lot of years of experience in this group and we want to use it, in order to not only combat this particular virus, but also educate at the same time.
We should just point out, that this is not an all-boys club though, and had a good chuckle at the Mybroadband staff writer referring to a “he”.
We understand the challenges, we understand the differences as pointed out by you, and we are trying out a new approach. It is of course very easy to stand on the side lines and shout, but we invite you, to come and help.
We will not only name & shame, but will be engaging/notifying the people of such listings and that is a slight difference between us and ISPA’s Hall of Shame. Every quarter or so, an updated version of the list comes out and surprise people. We are not taking away the hard work that has gone into the Hall of Shame, hours and hours of working through spam submissions, keeping track of data and everything else that goes with it.
ISPA took the initial step in taking on spammers and of course, it is up to us all, to decide whether we want to use that list on our mail servers. They are certainly not forcing it down anybody’s throat. Let’s not forget about the current legal issue between them and Ketler Presentations. The outcome will be ground-breaking for the South African community. Either we will be moving forward and have the law behind us, or set us back years & years.
We are also busy developing a functional website linked to the Spammer database, which will include statistics, RBL, whitelistings, search functionality on domain, IPs etc in order to see why they are listed, when they were listed, when last a complaint lodged against them. We are not going to hide the complaints. If you spammed, we will have that spam in the database, and anybody can look at it. The recipients will be removed to avoid future harvesting.
We are busy liaising with Project Honeypot and being proactive by notifying South African ISP to clean up their act, make sure their IPs are reputable. Have a look for instance at
http://www.projecthoneypot.org/list_of_ips.php?t=h&ctry=ZA&rf=131674 . Do ISPs actually care about their reputation out there?
We want to engage with the community here and work together. As mentioned earlier, why can ISPs not work with each other and stop a spammer from moving ISPs. Why can Uniform, the current COZA registrar, not do something about domains registered purely for spam?
Sure, we are open to some abuse, one reader of MyBroadband pointed out that giving out our email address is not clever and he knows people that will be bombarding us; we are going to make some mistakes, but we will own up, and learn from it and be better at it.
We welcome all suggestions, all support, and anybody can email us for assistance, to complain or whatever the case might be. Catch us on Facebook/Twitter. We all have full time job, so responding might be delayed from time to time, but we will respond.
This is our start. Help us, to help you.
#ZASS
