If there was ever a doubt that the Rootsweb team works hard to keep our
surname lists going, this note should help everyone realize the type of
problems they deal with so that we may enjoy the benefits of our mailing
lists. It's sad that so much time and money has to be spent fighting off
spam, but that seems to be the case. If any of you were around a couple
of years ago, you will remember e-mail spammers attacking the Maiser system
at Indiana University brought our lists to a complete halt. Fortunately,
Rootsweb stepped in and took on the responsibility of housing our lists on
their servers.
I apologize for the length of this note, but I wanted to send the entire
note so you can get a feel for what Rootsweb does for us.
Thanks...........Wanda
Date: Mon, 15 Jun 1998 19:48:05 -0700
From: Tim Pierce <twp(a)rootsweb.com>
To: listowners-L(a)rootsweb.com
Message-ID: <19980615194805.E7224(a)rootsweb.com>
Subject: SPAM REPORT: Boy, have we been busy.
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
This was quite a day for the RootsWeb abuse team.
famhis(a)doit.cc, origin(a)doit.cc, heraldry(a)doit.cc
================================================
This morning, our old friends in Bath, ID called us up and spammed
the bejesus out of our machines with their bogus surname history
scams. All of their posts came from a forged `doit.cc' domain,
which I blocked as soon as I got word of what was
happening... because of serious net lag this morning, however,
that didn't happen until well after they'd achieved their goal.
Something important to remember: the reason this spam wasn't
refused outright doesn't have anything to do with its genealogical
trappings. The simple reason that it got through to your lists
was that the text and sender of the message didn't match anything
that our spam filter recognized as spam. Now that I've added
their forged domain to our `spamdomains' list, you shouldn't see
anything more from them.
CVBOX spam
==========
Meanwhile, back at the ranch... this afternoon, a Portuguese spam
outfit connected to
rootsweb.com and spammed just about every list
on our system. Three times each. Over about an hour, they pumped
about 4,000 messages and 11MB into our list servers. Thankfully,
they're using a well-known spamming software package that was
readily caught by our filters, so none of your lists should have
been bothered by this.
Even as I started to write this message, they started to do it ALL
OVER AGAIN. So we had to take more drastic measures, dropping the
Internet routes to their systems and blocking any mail from their
(forged) domain name. That should prevent them from even being
able to connect to our machines.
So if I'm a little scarce for a while, you have some idea of why.
Getting copies of 4000 spams in your mailbox tends to slow you
down a little.
All of the RootsWeb Members, Sponsors and Donors out there should
congratulate yourselves a little for this. The funds that you've
contributed to improve RootsWeb's systems were directly
responsible for our being able to implement spam filters like
these. If it weren't for your support, RootsWeb's list servers
would be a smoking pile of slag right now. Thanks for helping
keep us running!
Regards,
Tim Pierce
RootsWeb Genealogical Data Cooperative
system obfuscator and hack-of-all-trades