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| Legal Stuff: Spam Policies |
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What is being done to combat it.
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This page is to inform both our customers and the general public
what is being done to combat the growing issue of spam emanating
from wholesale suppliers in the wake of the enormous growth of the
internet. If you have a need to report a spammer, please do so by
sending as much detailed information about the offender as possible
to the following address:
Our staff will take your complaints very seriously and do all they
are able to in any way to eliminate the originator of the violation.
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Introduction
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Spam is a problem that could have a serious impact on the
continued success of the Cledo service and our
customers. Due to the overwhelming growth of the Wholesale Dial-up
market there has been an unfortunate expansion of spam originating
from these Wholesale Dial-up ports. With hundreds of ISPs utilizing
the Wholesale services to expand their national footprint, the
likelihood of a spammer signing up with an ISP using the Wholesale
services is rapidly increasing.
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Background
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The way spam is typically sent has continually evolved as new ways
to combat and block it have been developed. The current trend in
sending spam employs software that runs over a dial-up connection
and connects directly to the mail port of the target. This is the
hardest to block because it doesn't pass through any "mail
relay" servers, on which anti-spam filters could be employed.
The target has difficulty in stopping the attack without also
blocking other legitimate mail from coming through. Once a spammer
is identified, the account can be quickly identified and terminated.
However, due to the success of the internet and the ISP market, many
accounts can be obtained on a trial basis for little or no money,
accounts can be activated over the phone with falsified information,
and other tricks can be used to gain a "throw-away"
account. ISPs can combat the proliferation of spam accounts, but due
to market pressures, most do not scrutinize each account to ensure
that it is not going to be used to spam. The further a company is
from dealing with the individual end-users, the harder it becomes to
scrutinize new accounts. It is not realistic to expect this of every
ISP, and even when such monitoring is done, it cannot completely
prevent this type of spam from being sent. Careful monitoring merely
stops spammers from being able to spam with free accounts. Some
would argue that once spammers are hit in the wallet, they will mend
their ways and move on to something else. That is not likely to
occur.
This is the issue facing Cledo. There are too many
spammers using too many "throw-away" accounts to continue
to attempt to combat the problem. Therefore, we have implemented a
proactive solution that helps to resolve this problem.
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The Problem Defined
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Mail uses TCP port 25 for sending and receiving mail between
servers. Spam software either connects directly to TCP port 25 on
the mail servers being targeted, or routes its mail though
Open-Relay servers (mass email marketers call these "email
friendly off-shore servers"). Because it connects either
directly or indirectly in this fashion it is extremely difficult for
the target server to block the incoming spam.
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The Solution
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Blocking port 25 is extremely easy to do, but one problem with
blocking port 25 is that once done, legitimate users can no longer
send email because they cannot connect back to their ISP's mail
server. Maintaining a single filter to allow access back to each
Wholesale customer's mail servers is not a scalable solution.
Assuming that each ISP has a minimum of two mail servers, and
factoring in the fact that there are already thousands of ISPs,
there could be several thousand lines in the access list. Add in the
fact that some ISP's have more than two mail servers, and that some
Wholesale customers are in turn reselling the Wholesale service to
yet more ISPs, and you suddenly have an extremely long and complex
filter, a filter that has to be updated every time an ISP is added
to the various Wholesale services, leaves the services, or has to
change its server's IPs. This is not a viable option.
Our solution employs several technologies, the first being a mail
server software solution which utilizes the SmiteSpam
service. SmiteSpam is a spam detection system which marks messages
with special headers to inform you that it thinks it is spam. You
can setup most email clients to filter on one or more of these
headers, meaning you can filter away your spam and never have to see
it.
SmiteSpam has two methods for determining spam, method one is a
full-text matching scan of the incoming message, trying to find key
phrases that identify spam. This is done at the server level, as
each message comes into the system. The second part is the reporting
of spam into the SmiteSpam system. Our system reports spam to
smitespam.com automatically and from then onward no other user of
SmiteSpam should receive the same spam that you just did.
Filtering has been extremely successful in blocking quite a bit of
spam, but it is not enough. RealTime Blacklists (RBL's) are also
employed to augment Spam filtering, and identify known Open Relay
servers and Open Proxy servers. Connections from these blacklisted
servers are immediately rejected. Spam that slips past these primary
measures are identified and their servers are blocked at our border
router and can no longer enter our network. The vast majority of
these servers do not have a reverse DNS entry and are easily
identifiable.
Cledo wants to work with all of our customers to
make this process as transparent to the end-users as can be. We
welcome any feedback that you may have regarding this solution.
Please contact a Customer
Service Representative with any questions or comments you may
have.
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| Contact Information |
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| E-mail: |
Support |
| Office Address: |
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Cledo Online
2201 Commerce Dr.
Fremont, Ohio 43420
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| Postal Mail: |
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Cledo Online
P.O. Box 453
Bellevue, Ohio 44811
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| E-mail: |
Billing |
| Toll Free: |
(866) 672-5168 |
| Office: |
(419) 217-1090 |
| Fax: |
(309) 403-5117 |
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