Regarding Spam

[John Howe]

Hey CCPG Folks,

Maybe you have seen the recent message titled "ATTENTION  BUSINESS OWNERS".
I really hate spam, with a passion. Besides it is illegal in the State of
Washington. <http://www.wa.gov/AGO/junkemail/>

To see options about dealing with spam, check out <http://spam.abuse.net/spam/>

In this message, the person says to reply to a yahoo e-mail account. Don't!
What I do is immediately forward the offending message to
<abuse at yahoo.com>. They disconnect the free e-mail account. ( This was
assigned P.R. Ticket 040199-24566-5756 ).

I also track the connect information since our mail-server only allows
connects form valid hosts. In this case, this message was relayed from: 

Received: from orion.linear.com.br (orion.linear.com.br [200.202.215.3])
	by kokoro.enso-company.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id EAA00342
	for <ccpg at arashi.com>; Thu, 1 Apr 1999 04:30:46 -0800 (PST)

Orion.linear.com.br seems to be a portuguese site from their web site. 

If you are good with telnet, you can probe the relaying machine. Looks like
this:

% telnet orion.linear.com.br 25
Trying 200.202.215.3...
Connected to orion.linear.com.br.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 orion.linear.com.br  Sendmail SMI-8.6/SMI-SVR4 ready at Thu, 1 Apr 1999
20:0
7:31 -0300
ehlo daemon
250-orion.linear.com.br  Hello [192.243.33.85], pleased to meet you
250-EXPN
250-SIZE
250 HELP
expn root
250 Super-User <root at orion.linear.com.br >
expn abuse
550 abuse... User unknown
expn postmaster
250 Super-User <root at orion.linear.com.br >

So lets forward a complaint to the postmaster of this site and ask them
politely to discourage relaying.

Another thing in this e-mail/uce, this person left a toll-free # in their
message. If it is toll-free, I usually call it. What the heck, it's free
right? Well this time, an actual living person picked up the phone. What a
surprise! I usually anticipate a voice messaging system. So I was curt with
the gentleman, I said spam was illegal in the State of Washington, that I
have reported him to abuse at yahoo.com ( more than once ), and am proceeding
to forward this mess to the State Attorneys Office. And send a nice note to
the admin @ orion.linear.com.br to ask them to kill their open relaying.

In some weird way, having a spam on April Fool's day seems strangely
appropriate. Anyways, that my short story for today. I am working in the
background to killfile this mess. I try to keep this message board clean.

That's my rant. Enjoy. 

John Howe

John Howe

<http://www.arashi.com/>
John Howe <Dragon at arashi.com>