Unsolicited Commercial Email / Unsolicited Bulk Email /
Spam FAQ
Please see our Important Notice, we recommend that you read it before you
proceed.
What is UCE / spam?
Where does UCE come from?
Is UCE legal?
Where is Equestrian Websites'
Mail AUP?
How did "spammers" get my email
address?
How can I report offensive
messages?
Why
doesn't Equestrian Websites filter my email messages for UCE?
What can I do to avoid spam?
How can I deal
with UCE I'm already receiving?
What is UCE / spam?
Unsolicited Commercial Email is advertising material
sent and received by email without the recipient either requesting such
information or otherwise explicitly expressing an interest in the material
advertised.
Just like receiving junk mail through your letterbox, UCE / spam consists of
junk mail that arrives on your computer. But unlike postal mail, the recipient
has to bear most of the costs of spam, whether or not it's automatically deleted
without being seen. Unsolicited Commercial Email and Unsolicited Bulk Email (UCE/UBE),
usually in the form of marketing campaigns, get rich schemes and pornography,
are popularly referred to as "spam".
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Where does UCE come from?
Some 'spam' is sent by companies that are new to the Internet and do not
understand how unwelcome this material is. However recent reports suggest that
90% of all the material currently being sent originates from as few as 180
individuals or 'spam gangs'. These groups make a business out of promoting
unsavoury (and sometimes illegal) material. They hide the true origin of the
material by relaying their email via insecure mail systems and machines.
Although in the past they have targeted incorrectly configured machines at ISPs
and large companies, they now regularly exploit end-user ("customer") machines.
Equestrian Websites is committed to ensuring that our customer's machines cannot
be exploited in this manner.
Due to the global scale of the UCE problem, governments are looking to tackle
the problem with the introduction of legislation. These however will only
influence each individual country, the UK currently generates a very small
percentage of UCE and any such legislation would have a minor impact on the
overall volumes received within the UK.
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Is UCE legal?
In the UK, the Advertising Standards Authority has recently introduced some
guidelines, making sure advertisers have prior consent, that advertisements
should be clearly marked and contain suitable content etc. Sadly, most UCE does
not originate from the UK and therefore will rarely adhere to the ASA
guidelines. The European Union has recently voted to ban unsolicited email. It
is proposed that advertisers will have to have recipients' consent before
sending email. The details of this 'opt in' scheme are in the process of being
finalized and adopted by all member countries.
In the US, some states have laws against the sending of unsolicited email. New
anti-spam legislation is currently being drafted for other parts of the US.
However due to the nature of the Internet it is likely that the perpetrators
will simply move their servers. Many of the "spammers" will hide their
activities by sending emails via unsecured machines they find elsewhere on the
Internet. Regardless of legislation, virtually all ISPs have an Acceptable Usage
Policy (AUP), which should prohibit the sending of unsolicited email. It
therefore makes sense to report a "spammer's" activities to their ISP in the
first instance.
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Where is Equestrian Websites'
Mail AUP?
Equestrian Websites has had an AUP in place for a number of years. This is
defined in our
Terms &
Conditions.
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How did "spammers" get my
email address?
Email addresses are often harvested from newsgroups, chat rooms, mailing lists
and other sources where your email address is made public. Making your address
visible on a web page, either in the text or through a mail to: link is
considered the most likely way for "spammers" to obtain your email address.
This "harvesting" is often done via an automatic computer program or script.
Once on a "spammer's" list, your email address is often sold to other
"spammers". We recommend that customers should never respond to, or view,
websites advertised in UCE.
Some "spammers" take a "scattergun" approach - sending mail in bulk to a large
number of variant email addresses, making a note of the addresses that yield a
response.
Legitimate senders of email (where you have asked to be sent information in the
past) will offer you the option of discontinuing the correspondence. However,
unscrupulous senders of unsolicited email will use your "unsubscribe" request as
evidence that your email address is "live" and that you read the messages that
arrive. They will then send more material or sell on your address to other
"spammers", so that the net effect is an increase in junk.
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How can I report offensive
messages?
Equestrian Websites deal with any unsolicited bulk email that is being sent by
(or relayed by) our customers. However, they are unable to do anything about
"spam" sent from other ISPs. The first step is to work out where the UCE has
originated from and then send a copy to the originating ISP. You will need to
send a copy of ALL of the headers because they will need this information to
track down the exact customer who is responsible.
Various means are used to disguise its true origins, such as sending it through
Open Mail Relays and Open Proxy Servers. The UCE almost certainly has not come
from the address listed in the From header of your mail client. In order to work
out the originating ISP you will need to review the headers of the email. We
have provided some links to tutorials on this topic below.
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Why
doesn't Equestrian Websites filter my email messages for UCE?
To a certain extent we already do this. All incoming mail is checked
against multiple publicly available spammer lists. All mail originating from a
source shown on any of these lists is rejected at our mail servers. We also
maintain our own list of specific senders/ networks that are also rejected. We
estimate that about 75% of spam email is rejected by our system.
Filtering email, to discard the unwanted junk, often sounds like an attractive
option and indeed some people find that systems installed on their own machines
and tweaked for their own situation can work very well. However, beyond what we
already have in place, there are very
significant challenges in setting up a centralised system for a customer base as
diverse as Equestrian Websites' and providing assurances that no-one's
legitimate email will be discarded by mistake.
We are also mindful that filtering is essentially a stop-gap solution and that
the "spammers" are already modifying their material to make it harder and harder
to distinguish from legitimate email. To fight back, filters become more and
more "fuzzy" and this increases the risk of blocking the email that our
customers want to receive.
Equestrian Websites has investigated other email blocking solutions and at present we
do not believe that we could offer a general system that would be suitable for
customers. However, this is not a final judgement, and we will continue to
monitor what is available as systems are improved and updated.
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What can I do to avoid UCE?
You can reduce the UCE/UBE sent to your "real" address by being careful who you
reveal it to.
You should think carefully before making your email address public in any forum
and especially when providing it to websites you visit unless they are operated
by reputable companies, where there will usually be tick boxes where you can
express your preferences about the future receipt of marketing material from
them.
We have developed a system whereby email addresses shown on our web pages are
written in such a way that they are not easily machine readable. This stops
automatic "spam bots" reading email addresses from our web pages but still
allows them to function normally. This system has been in place for all new web
pages published since April 2005.
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How can I deal
with UCE that I am already receiving?
Most email clients can be configured only to accept email to specified
addresses, thereby rejecting (and causing to be removed from the server)
addresses to which you do not wish to receive email. This will cause email sent
to unwanted addresses to be deleted before downloading. Please note that some
clients will need to download the email envelope and / or headers to filter
mails. Details of how to do this are available
here for Outlook Express.
Care should however be taken to ensure that email to misspelled addresses is not
lost (eg john@ spelled as jon@ or allison@ spelled as alison@).
When it comes to email that is correctly addressed then you may wish to consider
one of the email filtering programs that are available. There are many such
packages, and impartial advice and details of some of these products are
available in the Spam Filtering section at:
http://spamlinks.net/
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Other useful information
For further information on this topic, you may wish to refer to some of the
websites listed below.
Tutorials on Reading Email Headers
http://www.stopspam.org/email/headers/headers.html
http://www.doofus.org/spam/lessons/
Sites providing various network tools which can help identify the originating
ISP
http://www.samspade.org/
http://www.geektools.com/
Abuse Contact Database which provides the contact address for a large number of
domains
http://www.abuse.net/lookup.phtml
Information on Virus Hoaxes and Chain Mails
http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/
http://www.vmyths.com/
A document regarding the running of Mailing Lists
http://www.linx.net/noncore/bcp/mailinglist-bcp.html
Virus information (from the major vendors)
http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/ <We use this one
http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/
http://www.viruslist.com/eng/
http://vil.nai.com/vil/
Spam Links
http://spamlinks.net/
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/AllAboutSpam.pdf
Blocking Messenger Spam
http://www.re-quest.net/computers/messenger-spam/
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IMPORTANT NOTICE
The URLs referred to above are hosted by third parties. Equestrian Websites
shall not be responsible or liable for the content, materials or software
provided by any third parties, including, without limitation, any error,
omission or inaccuracy therein. Equestrian Websites is unable to provide any
support services in relation to any software downloaded from or referred to in
the URLs referred to above.
