Un-Due Process - Part 1

"Automatic complaints are sent when a filter whose action is
set to Kill after complaining is triggered. For each filter, you
can configure who the complaint should be sent to. ... The
message body is also scanned for e-mail and website
addresses. If any addresses are found, they're added to the
lists mentioned above."
Source: http://www.spamkiller.com/Features.html

SpamKiller is spam filtering software. Its purpose is to
scan incoming email for spam and take appropriate action
in response to those messages that are identified as spam,
such as automatic deletion. Another handy function is that
the software allows the user to generate automatic and
manual complaint emails which the user then sends to the
webmaster of the offending domain as well as any number of
other recipients such as spam-reporting "authorities" and
the webhost and/or ISP of the person sending the offending
mail.

Good idea, you say? Fair enough, you say? Well ... maybe.
Note the quote above: "... The message body is also scanned
for e-mail and website addresses ... [and] added to the lists
mentioned above", i.e. the list of recipients of the complaint.

Now, imagine this. Let's say you're a paying advertiser
in my ezine. Your ad contains your URL and email
address. I spam mail my ezine or send it to someone
who forgets they subscribed and they think it's spam.

Imagine further that the recipient of my so-called spam uses
SpamKiller software (or some similar program). The software
scans the message header and extracts the relevant
information about the person who sent the email (me). Fair
enough. Assuming that it IS spam, of course.

But the capability of the software doesn't stop there. As
mentioned in the above quote, it also scans the message
BODY, which contains your ad, and adds your URL and
email address to the list of recipients of the complaint. The
ever-diligent big-spam-hunter also makes sure that one or
more spam-reporting "authorities" is copied on the
complaint.

WeStopSpam.net*, diligent, professional organization that
it is, immediately and automatically forwards the complaint
to abuse@yourdomain.com and your webhost, an equally
diligent, professional organization shuts your site down
for three days for spamming.

You, of course, learn about all of this AFTER the event.

Think it can't happen to you? Think again. It happened to
me. This week. Except I wasn't a paying advertiser in the
offending ezine. The publisher of the ezine reprinted one
of my articles. The article contained my resource box.
The resource box contained my website URL. SpamKiller
added my URL to the list of recipients of the email
complaining of the "spam", copied WeStopSpam.net and
WeStopSpam.net forwarded the email to abuse@ahbbo.com
with the result that my webhost, DumbHost*, shut down my
site for what was to be three days.

The actual downtime was two hours. By that time I had
threatened to sue and they finally got around to actually
READING the offending email and realizing that I, in fact,
was just an innocent bystander.

There is so much that is wrong in this whole scenario that
it's hard to know where to begin.

THE PERSON WHO GENERATED THE COMPLAINT

Let's start with the individual who generated the complaint
in the first place. This is the person using the SpamKiller
software. His email to me (which was auto-generated by
SpamKiller) contained the following subject line:

"UCE Complaint (So-and-So Newsletter*)"

The body started out:

"I have received the attached unsolicited e-mail from
someone at your domain. [He had not.]

"I do not wish to receive such messages in the future, so
please take the appropriate measures to ensure that this
unsolicited e-mail is not repeated.

"--- This message was intercepted by SpamKiller
(www.spamkiller.com) ---"

The full text of the intercepted message followed.

The header of the offending email clearly showed that the
sender of the email was someone from so-and-so.com*.
Unfortunately, the newsletter concerned contained virtually
nothing but my article interrupted by what I assume were
paid ads.

I'm sure that the paid advertisers in this particular ezine
also received a complaint and that WeStopSpam.net received
a copy and automatically forwarded it to the advertiser's
ISP and/or webhost who may or may not have shut them
down, at least temporarily. (Hopefully not all webhosts
are of the calibre of DumbHost when it comes to this sort of
thing.)

So, this individual, in his zealousness to rid the Internet
of spam, blithely dragged the names and reputations of at
least half a dozen perfectly innocent bystanders through the
mud.

The moral of the story? If you use spam-filtering software
and the complaint-generating function that comes with it,
have the common decency and responsibility to stop and
think about who you're adding to your hitlist. If you don't,
and you get it wrong, don't be surprised to find a process-
server on your doorstep.

SPAM FILTERING SOFTWARE

To give SpamKiller its due, it appears to be an excellent
product. There's a free 30 day download available at
http://www.spamkiller.com . I downloaded it myself to
see what, if any, cautions are given to users about the
need to make sure that the recipient of the complaint is,
in fact, responsible for the email concerned.

Well, there is such a caution but it took me a good 45
minutes to find it. The software comes with an excellent,
comprehensive built-in help facility. Tucked away at the
end of the page on "Sending manual complaints" is the
caution:

"Note: SpamKiller does not check that the loaded
addresses are appropriate for the selected message. Don't
use a ... complaint unless you are certain that its recipients
are responsible for the spam that you are complaining
about."

I would respectfully suggest that this warning be displayed
in a more prominent position, coupled with warnings about
what can happen to those who use the software in an
irresponsible manner so as to ensnare innocent parties.

WESTOPSPAM.NET

Now, let's take a look at WeStopSpam.net's role in all of
this. In my case, "all" they did was forward a complaint
they had received from our friend in the previous section
to my webhost. Here's what they sent:

"From: 17846286@reports.westopspam.net
To: abuse@dumbhost.com
X-Loop: one
Subject: [WeStopSpam (http://www.ahbbo.com) id:17846286]
So-and-So Newsletter
Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2001 23:14:50 -0700 (MST)
X-Mailer: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98)
via http://westopspam.net/ v1.3.1
- WeStopSpam V1.3.1 -
This message is brief for your comfort. ...
Spamvertised website: http://www.ahbbo.com
> http://www.ahbbo.com is 63.249.189.106; Tue, 27 Feb 2001
02:56:58 GMT
Offending message: ..."

So, my website was reported for spamming because it was
"spamvertised" - lovely butchering of the English language, I
must say. This appears to be a coined term for a website that
is advertised by means of spam. This means that any paying
advertiser in the ezine itself is treated as a spammer, merely
because spam was used to send the ezine.

I checked out the website of the ezine concerned. It proclaimed
that its 85,000 subscribers were all "opt-in" i.e. that the
subscribers each took some positive step to have their email
address added to the ezine's mailing list.

Any reputable advertiser is going to be concerned that the
recipients of the ezine are opt-in, so this would have been of
comfort to the advertisers concerned in this instance.

Mind you, when I sent an email to the address displayed at
the publisher's site, it bounced. Maybe this person IS a
spammer. I don't know. And that's the point. How are you
supposed to know that if you're just the advertiser or article
author?

But, as far as WeStopSpam.net is concerned, that doesn't
matter. The mere fact that the advertiser's opportunity was
advertised in the allegedly spam email is sufficient to make
the advertiser a legitimate target. In my case, I didn't even
advertise! The publisher of the ezine ran my article. How
many of you out there make your articles freely available for
reprint?

WeStopSpam.net would presumably have you restrict the
reprint rights to your articles to only those publishers who you
know for a FACT are sending to a 100% guaranteed opt-in list.
How do you do that? Quite simply, you can't. To expect any
such thing is just unreal and smacks of an appalling lack of
understanding about how the online world works.

A reasonable compromise would be if reprint rights were
granted to publishers who send their ezine to an opt-in list. I
would have no objection to that. Of course, that wouldn't help
you with WeStopSpam.org because their policy is to shoot
first and ask questions later ... but wait, on second thought,
they don't even ask questions later. They just shoot.

You don't get a "please explain" or anything else. You're
convicted first and then it's up to you to prove that you're
innocent. Of course, by then, the damage is done. But
WeStopSpam.org doesn't care. I'm sure they see it as just a
casualty of war.