I clicked ‘Send’ on a rather important business-related email several days ago, and began shutting down my computer, barely giving it another thought. Within a few moments, however, a bounce message came back, alerting me that my mail had been flagged as spam — worse, in fact, my IP had.

This page exists on Shared Hosting, which means that a single server at Surpass hosts this and approximately 150 other small sites. One of these 150 other users, one of them used their shared hosting account to send a 419 mailing, and now that server’s IP, my IP, is listed at at least two major ‘Spam-Originating Host’ Directories. The two organizations that rejected my mailings were SpamCop and SpamHaus.

To the credit of the excellent people at Surpass, the troublesome user has been expelled, the IP of the server is in the process of being released, and so it’ll shortly be business as usual.

But I’d never seen spam-blocking of this nature before — I’d assumed it was almost entirely inbox-sided. Paul Graham’s articles on killing spam have fascinated me since I first found them several years ago. Mozilla Thunderbird, my mail client, uses a Bayesian filter, and has not had a single false-positive since I started with it in September. And it’s caught all but a small handful of spam.

One thing I found at the SpamHaus page that interested me was the ROKSO, the Register of Known Spam Operations. It’s amazing to see that 99% of the spam we receive originates from only a handful of major sources. Many of the names on the Register are familiar to us, others are just aliases that use aliases.

Anyhow, if you’ve sent me mail in the last few days, and I either haven’t replied, or replied from my uwaterloo account, I apologize for the inconvenience. But I’m back on track, now, I think.

Mike

← Earlier Later → Posted at 12:00 pm to Internet.