 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||
|
|
SPAM is also known as "Unsolicited Commercial Email." It is email sent to you without your permission that offers to sell you something, asks for donations or tries to involve you in get-rich-quick schemes. Usually, SPAM is bulk-mailed to hundreds or thousands of email users.
No. ARRL does not publish or provide email addresses to any third party.
They use "spambots," software programs that search Web pages, newsgroups and mailing lists automatically extracting email addresses. If your arrl.net address appears anywhere on the Internet, you will almost certainly get SPAM.
No, they didn't. There are many arrl.net users whose arrl.net addresses have been in the system since its beginning who have never had any SPAM sent to their arrl.net address. Check for your address on the Internet search engines, such as Google (http://www.google.com/). Enter your full arrl.net address in their search boxes and see what you get. Try several different search engines. Try Google's newsgroup search (http://groups.google.com/). If they can find your address, the SPAMmers can, too.
Also, since it costs them essentially nothing to send the SPAM messages, some SPAMmers just generate addresses at random. If only a few get delivered anywhere, the SPAMmers figure they're still coming out ahead.
The "To" line of a message actually has nothing to do with where the message gets delivered. That's why a message with your arrl.net address in the "To" line can get delivered to your home mailbox. Unfortunately, SPAMmers take advantage of that feature of Internet email to put deceptive addresses in the "To" field. The actual delivery address is transferred between Internet mail systems in an "envelope," and it is the envelope address that specifies where the message gets delivered, not the "To" line of the message. (It's as though you sent someone a letter via the Post Office with one name and address on the envelope and a different one on the letter. Looking at the letter wouldn't tell anyone what the envelope said.)
Some Internet mail servers add the actual recipient address (from the "envelope") to the header lines of the message when they relay it. Most mail-reading programs don't normally display those header lines but do have some means of doing so. Check the help file for your mail program to find out how to display all headers.
Just like the "To" line, the "From" line need not contain the actual address of the sending party. So, in order to make people want to open the SPAM messages they receive, the SPAMmers use made-up "From" addresses, or addresses from their mailing lists. If the SPAMmer uses your address in the "From" field, it looks to the person receiving the message as though it came from you. (Again, there's a postal analogy: Someone could send a letter purporting to be from you and with your return address on it. Until the recipent contacts you, they have no way of knowing the letter is not from you.)
The ARRL has added both spam filtering and virus scanning to the ARRL.net E-mail Forwarding Service. However, while these will help reduce the volume of unwanted messages through your ARRL.net address, no single solution is 100% effective in eliminating spam while allowing all legitimate messages to come through. Filtering is still not an exact science despite what the claims made by software manufacturers. Overly aggressive filtering would result in legitimate messages being misidentified as spam and not delivered. This is the "other side of the coin" when you are filtering for spam and we will do everything in our power to minimize this risk. Again, like your home ISP, we cannot guarantee 100% delivery but that is what we will strive to do.
Spammers are constantly working to find ways around commercial spam filters and, as such, fighting them is a never ending battle. As soon as a new filtering technique is developed, the spammers are working to minimize its effect on what they do. Technology will have to improve over time as the spammers become more proficient. This is why you may see periodic increases and decreases in the volume of spam.
Here are a few Web sites you can check that list means of fighting SPAM:
http://www.cauce.org/about/resources.shtml
http://spam.abuse.net/userhelp/
http://spamcop.net/
http://www.mailwasher.net/
