Collateral Damage in the Spam Wars

Increased filtering and blocking of email to defend recipients of email from the massive growth in spam email abuse sometimes leads to blocking of email from entities that are not themselves spamming or supporting spam abuse. This is an unfortunate side-effect of the current state of affairs.      However, it is important to remember that usually this is a result of the actions, or rather, the inactions, of the ISPs hosting the blocked IPs that might be considered collateral damage.      ISPs that continue to accept as customers not only legitimate customers but customers committing spam email abuse, or hosting spam email support sites, such as the web sites advertised in spam email, or violating other machines on the Internet by relaying through SMTP relays, open proxies, or hijacked PCs infected by Swen and Mydoom and similar viruses/worms, are just as guilty as the spammers, and must take responsibility for their failure to remove the abusers from their networks.      As a result, widening blocklisting of larger netblocks at such ISPs has increasingly become one of the tools utilized by network administrators trying to defend their customers and their email services.

Truthout.org Caught in SPEWS Blocklist, February, 2004