dont-spam.us

I own the domain "dont-spam.us". If it's not obvious from the name, and the fact that I've gone to the trouble of registering it as a domain name, and creating this web site, I'm one of the most anti-spam people you could ever meet.

This page, and the honeypot it describes, originally existed under the domain name "delete.net". However, in January 2008 I accepted an offer to purchase the name, so I no longer own it.

Automatic Reporting System

The main purpose of the "dont-spam.us" domain is a "honeypot". Any email received by an "@delete.net" email address is automatically treated as spam, forwarded to SpamCop, and added to my private blacklist- which results in the sending IP no longer being allowed to send mail to my server, or the servers of other people (mainly my clients) who use my list to filter their incoming mail.

There are not, and never have been, any valid email addresses in the "@dont-spam.us" domain. DO NOT send email to any email address ending with "@dont-spam.us" or your IP address will be blocked, and the message will be reported to SpamCop.

The honeypot and automatic blacklisting system started with the domain "delete.net". Between delete.net and dont-spam.us, there are currently 51,588 entries on the blacklist. These IP addresses have been automatically added as spam has come in since 2004-10-19, which is the last time I purged the list (there were over 40,000 entries before that, which gives you an idea of the volume of spam that my server has to deal with.

Because so many people are asking, I will tell people that the DNS suffix for the blacklist is "rbl.dont-spam.us". However, I do not recommend that anybody use this list to reject mail being sent to their own servers. There is no automated removal mechanism, which means that I have to handle any removals by hand- and I am not interested in being flooded with removal requests, especially from people that I don't know personally. I'm not saying not to use it, but I am saying that if you do use it, you are on your own.

I have written a quick form to allow people to look up IP addresses on the list. However, there is no automated way to remove IPs from the list- if you feel that a particular IP is listed by mistake, the owner of the IP address will need to contact me directly.

Suggestions

Here are some suggestions for what you can do about spam:

Never ask to be removed, unless it's a company with whom you already have an existing business relationship of some kind (i.e. you bought one of their products and gave them your email address) or that you know how to reach through some method other than email.

Most spammers have databases full of email addresses, and they don't know if these addresses actually reach people or not. If you respond to one of their messages and ask to be removed, you are telling them that your email address is "a live one". Not only does this guarantee that you will receive more spam from the same people, but he can then sell your email address to other spammers and get two to three times as much for it as they would for an "unverified" address.
Do not let your email program show HTML automatically, or if your email program offers you the option to show HTML without loading any external images, use it. (Thunderbird and the mail client built into Mozilla both give you this option.)

Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express do not give you this option, and they don't have any method of disabling HTML emails. I cannot recommend strongly enough that you NOT use these programs for email.

The reason is that these images are another way that the spammers track which email addresses actually reach people. By using special filenames containing "cookies", their web server's log file will tell them which email messages were actually opened by an email program. It will also tell them what the IP address was where you read the message (or previewed it.)
Report any SPAM you receive. Do not be satisfied with "just pressing DELETE" every time you receive spam. The only way to stop the spammers is to take away their Internet connections, and the only way to do that is to convince their ISP's that it would be in their best interest not to do buisiness with the spammer.

Having spent almost ten years working for ISP's, I can tell you that when a lot of people complain about something all at once, that issue gets taken care of a lot faster. For spam this usually means that the spammer has their account suspended or terminated, and if the message itself talks about anything illegal, it gets reported to the local law enforcement. The more people who complain about spam coming from their network, the sooner they will do something about stopping that spam.

Note that Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express don't send the full headers when they forward an email message (this is another reason not to use these programs for email.) With that said, if you know how to read the headers and find the responsible parties and their ISP's, then by all means go for it!

If not, you can use SpamCop to scan the headers and automatically send a complaint to the ISP's responsible for making that particular spammer stop.

Once you have signed up with SpamCop, they will give you a special email address for submissions. Whenever you receive a SPAM message, you forward it to that address, WITH FULL HEADERS, and they start the process. They will send you back an email with a link to a web page. When you go to this page, you will be able to read, line-by-line, exactly what SpamCop is doing when it decodes the headers and finds the responsible parties.

It also has a button at the bottom to actually submit the report and send the complaints out to the responsible parties. If you don't go to the web page and click this button, your complaint will not be sent to anybody, and after three days it will expire.

SpamCop also offers a non-free service (currently $30/yr) which gives you a mailbox on their server, with all incoming mail filtered for spam before it ever reaches that mailbox. I'm using it myself (check out the email address at the bottom of this web page.) I use it anywhere I have to put my email address in public, or any time I am "required" to give some company an email address in order to use their web site or download their software or whatever. The mailbox is available through a WebMail interface or via SSL-secured IMAP.
NEVER purchase ANYTHING from an offer you receive via spam. This should be the most obvious hint in the world. Spammers send spam because there are people out there who are stupid enough to buy whatever it is they're selling. If everybody were to stop buying from their offers, it wouldn't make financial sense for them to continue sending spam.

The most obvious problem is that you don't know who you're buying from, and if they don't actually ship your merchandise you almost never have any way to find them to demand a refund. If you're lucky your credit card company will be able to reverse the charge after a certain period of time if the merchandise never shows up.

And if you're even more lucky, the spammer will not have run up thousands of dollars in other charges on your card. Remember... spammers are SCUM. The people who send spam are the same kind of people, and in many cases are the same people, who commit identity theft.
Be aware. Learn what the issues and the dangers are, and what actual laws apply to SPAM in your part of the world. If these laws (or lack of laws) are not to your liking, contact your lawmakers and tell them how you think it should be. If you feel (as I do) that there should be a firm law against spamming at the national level, and that the CAN-SPAM act which was signed into law in the USA in December 2003 is nothing but a license for every spammer in the world to get "one free shot" at your mailbox, then work through your government and make it happen.
If you run a mail server, use SPF. SPF, or Sender Policy Framework, is a mechanism which allows the owner of a domain name to specify which IP addresses have permission to send email which claims to be "From" their domain. Most mail server software packages have an option, or an add-in, to enable checking these SPF records. The idea is that if an incoming mail claims to be "From: user@domain.com", but the IP address which is handing you the message isn't on the list of approved servers for "domain.com", then you know the message is using a forged "From" address and can automatically reject, drop, or tag the message for further handling by filters.
Spread the word. Make sure your friends, family members, and anybody else with whom you exchange email, understands what spam is and why it's so important to follow the tips on this page. Feel free to give out the address of this web page, but make sure to tell them not to try and send email to the domain. Also feel free to share the links listed below, and if you have any other good web sites with anti-spam information that you think should be listed here, please let me know.

Links

www.spamlaws.com is a site containing copies of the active and proposed laws concerning spam, at all levels of the government- federal, state, and in some cases local.
www.eff.org is the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They are a lobbying group who stands up for the rights of the common citizens when it comes to computers and the Internet. SPAM is one of many topics on which they take a stand. I find myself in agreement with most of their positions, but look through their site and make up your own mind.
www.cauce.org is the Campaign Against Unsolicited Commercial Email. They are another lobbying group, but their focus is specifically on SPAM. Their site is also well worth reading through.

If anybody knows of other sites which should be linked here, please email me at the address below and let me know.

2004-05-15 Scott Richter, of OptInRealBig.com and WholesaleBandwidth.com, has filed a lawsuit against SpamCop and somehow or other managed to get a preliminary injunction which bars SpamCop from complaining to his upstream providers. As a result, there is an initiative underway to try and form a class-action lawsuit against him.

This link goes to the thread on SpamCop's forums which discusses the issue. I have posted a message (on page 8 of the thread) explaining about the rbl.delete.net blacklist and the fact that the blacklist filter has caught 530 emails from a block of IP addresses which belong to this spammer (69.6.0.0/18), and that I am willing to print out the actual messages and send them to the FTC as evidence. We'll see what happens...

Also, this link goes to a petition which will be sent to lawmakers so that they will realize how serious an issue this is. If you hate receiving spam, please go read it- and if you agree with it, sign it. (I'm number 130 on the list of signatories.)

2004-10-19 Those who know me, know that when I make a mistake I will admit it. Earlier today I found a bug in the code which automatically reports messages to Spamcop. As a result, my server was accidentally reporting certain types of mis-formed bounce messages as spam. The code has been corrected.

However, rather than manually inspecting over 40,000 messages to find and remove roughly 150 IP addresses which shouldn't have been listed in the first place, I decided to purge the rbl.delete.net blacklist.

One thing that I find telling is that in the first eight hours after purging the list, the system caught over 100 messages. I'm thinking about writing some kind of reporting system for the blacklist (beyond just the automatic total at the top of this page)... of course if I do this it will be listed on this page.