Managing Spam

Buried under get-rich-quick schemes and other unwanted e-mail? This is called "spam," and it has increased over 400 percent in recent months, and it will only get worse.

Rule #1 about spam: never reply to it. Often the return address is phony (usually because they are asking you to see a web page or telephone them), but sometimes the spam is intended to collect "live" e-mail addresses. By replying, you have shown them that the person at your address reads unsolicited mail, and your address will be sold at a premium price to other spammers.

What else can be done? Alas, there are no easy answers. Although the spammers have claimed that their messages are covered by the First Amendment, it has yet to be tested in high courts. There is some hope that a law regarding junk faxes, which allows you to sue the sender of an unwanted fax for up to $500, may also apply to this kind of unwanted e-mail.

Like most responsible Internet providers, Monitor Publishing has an anti-spam policy as part of its Terms of Service, and will immediately close any account responsible for such bulk e-mail, billing the offender $200/hr for our time spent in response.

Some customers have asked us to block spam at the system level. Sure, it's possible to have Monitor analyze all incoming mail and discard messages believed to be spam. While software like that may work with 99+ percent accuracy, it will still sometimes throw away a message you want. It may also block you from sending e-mail to someone whose Internet provider happens to be on someone's blacklist ( Read this recent story from the SF Chronicle for such a horror story).

These are not acceptable options, to our thinking; it is important that you trust your mail delivery. Right now we can say with complete confidence that (barring catastrophic failure) all of your mail is delivered to your mailbox immediately or sent to the e-mail address you intended. If we used some kind of analysis software, you will no longer be certain that you are receiving all of your mail. Do you really want there to be any possibility that the message could have been accidentally thrown away? Of course not!

Below are described three ways to manage spam safely. Try these methods alone and in combination -- but if the flood is just overwhelming, we'll change the account name, as described in the last option.

• DOMAIN ADDRESSES Do you have your own domain name hosted at Monitor? If so, then you can probably eliminate all of your spam easily. The key to this solution is using a specific address at your domain for all your mail.

  As an example, imagine that your e-mail address is mary@monitor.net, and you own the domain bodegabaywine.com. Start using mary@bodegabaywine.com as your e-mail address. After a month or so -- when you're certain that everyone you correspond with knows the new address -- write a note to support@monitor.net. Request:

  1) a private mailbox
  2) all mail sent to mary@bodegabaywine.com to be routed there
  3) drop all mail for mary@monitor.net

  IMPORTANT: Once the changes are made, any mail sent to your old address will be destroyed. The sender will NOT receive notice that the message was destroyed. Also, any incoming mail that is sent to a MISSPELLED address at your domain will also be destroyed immediately. We cannot take responsibility for any mail that is lost in this manner.

• SPAM ASSASSIN If you don't have a domain name, you can at least separate most of the spam from your regular mail before it is downloaded to your computer. This allows you to look over the spam mailbox occasionally and delete the unwanted messages all at once. You will also sometimes find some messages that are not spam.

  Monitor offers a spam filtering service that uses "Spam Assassin," a program that currently intercepts about 90 - 95 percent of the spam that is sent to you. These messages are kept for about two weeks in a special mailbox which can be reviewed via Monitor web mail before they are deleted.

  Spam filtering requires the account holder to sign an agreement annually that agrees to our terms of service, as well as payment of a $5/yr service charge. CLICK HERE for directions on how to use spam filtering.

• NAME CHANGE If all else fails and the flood of spam is still overwhelming, we are able to completely change your account name. Please understand that changing the username is a headache for us; the bookkeeper has to transfer your old data over to your new account, someone on staff has to update the customer databases, and the system engineer has to destroy the old identity -- all at about the same time. So there are three conditions:

  1) We can do only one name change per year
  2) Your account must be fully paid up
  3) You must write support@monitor.net to make an appointment so that we can coordinate it

  Just give us a range of times when you'll be available and at your computer ("early Tuesday afternoon" for example) and someone will get back to you with an exact time when everyone needed can be available.

  IMPORTANT: Once the changes are made, any mail sent to your old address will be destroyed. The sender will NOT receive notice that the message was destroyed

  If you have any questions about these options, please write support@monitor.net.

USING SPAM ASSASSIN

• HOW TO START USING SPAM ASSASSIN
  1. CLICK HERE and print the agreement that is shown. Sign the agreement and mail it with a $5 check to:

     Monitor
     POB 1733
     Sebastopol, CA 95473

     If you want to speed up processing, write SA in the lower left corner of the envelope so we can spot it easily. Overdue accounts must be paid in full before spam filtering activation.

  2. We will configure your mailbox to use Spam Assassin. Once it is active, an e-mail with the header "MONITOR SPAM FILTERING" will be sent to you.

  3. To look over your the mail that is filtered out as spam, go to Monitor web mail and log in with your name and password.

  4. Click on the "Folders" link near the top (Compose Addresses Folders...)

  5. At the bottom is a section called "Unsubscribe/Subscribe" with SPAM in the list. Highlight SPAM, then click on the "subscribe" button.

  6. Click on "refresh folder list."

  This concludes the one-time setup procedure for web mail. Now click on SPAM in the column on the left to view any spam caught by Spam Assassin. Please regularly visit this mailbox and look for mail that should not be classified as spam.
  

• HOW TO DO IT YOURSELF

  For $5/yr, Monitor will set up and maintain your files that redirect mail through Spam Assassin to the spam mailbox, where messages are kept for about two weeks before they are automatically deleted. You can avoid this charge, however, by editing those configuration files yourself. By doing so (or having someone do it on your behalf), it becomes your responsibility to make sure that the files are installed correctly and updated with any changes to Spam Assassin or our configuration -- if errors are made, your mail may not be delivered to you and may be returned to the sender. Any changes to the basic spam filtering configuration will appear on updates to this page in the details below, although it is possible that we may someday offer different options for better filtering.

  By installing Spam Assassin without our assistance, you are still bound by our terms of service that explain that you, the account owner, are responsible for ensuring that e-mail is not mistakenly classified as spam and deleted after the specified waiting period.

  To install spam filtering, you will need to create two files in your home directory, called .procmailrc and .forward exactly. (Sorry, we cannot provide technical support on editing UNIX files.)

  Contents of .procmailrc file:

  :0fw
  | /usr/local/bin/spamassassin -P -c /usr/local/share/spamassassin

  :0:
  * ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
  Mail/SPAM

  (Note that the line above that ends with '/spamassassin' is a single line that begins with the '|' character.) Now edit the .forward file. Copy and paste the code below, changing the reference to 'mary' at the end to be your own monitor.net account name:

  Contents of .forward file (this is all one line):

  "|IFS=' ' && p=/usr/local/bin/procmail && test -f $p && exec $p -Yf- || exit 75 #mary"

  Make sure your .forward is not group or world writable, or sendmail will ignore it ("chmod 644 .forward")

  As a final step, setup your webmail SPAM mailbox as described above.
  

• HOW IT WORKS Spam Assassin filters our unwanted e-mail by using a points system. Once you have it installed, a new "X-Spam-Status" header will be added to all your incoming mail. The line may look something like this:

  X-Spam-Status: No, hits=5.6 required=6.0 tests=INVALID_DATE_TZ_ABSURD,PLING,TO_MALFORMED,SERIOUS_ONLY

  This means that we have preset the spam threshold to 6, and e-mail must score at least that many points to be placed in the SPAM mailbox. In the above example, a spam squeaked through with a score of 5.6 although Spam Assassin determined that the message probably was spam. For more information, see the Spam Assassin web page.

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