Cfrq.net Spam Policy
This document is for authorized users and account holders of mail services on cfrq.net. It explains what the administrators of the mail server at cfrq.net will do when contacted about spam. The contents of this document may change from time to time at the pleasure (or displeasure) of the administrators.
cfrq.net is a non-profit hobby domain. Because the server has excess capacity, we are happy to offer mail services to friends and family. We do not give out our users' addresses to any commercial concern. We are anti-spam and will terminate any user who sends spam from a cfrq account.
Due to rapid increases in the volume of spam on the Internet, we are now experimenting with anti-spam techniques in the MTA. In some cases we have been convinced to adopt techniques in order to keep cfrq.net from being listed in some of the more aggressive blackhole lists.
With some exceptions, we do not allow connections from hosts without DNS entries, nor from addresses that cannot be resolved (and are, therefore, we cannot reply to). We reject delivery attempts from hosts using certain obvious anti-anti-spam techniques, such as identity spoofs.
We use a few reliable "blackhole" lists to deny spam from open relays, and from open web proxies. We use a technique known as "greylisting" to stop the vast majority of spam. We irregularly monitor logfiles to determine the effectiveness of these techniques.
We are willing to make exceptions for certain badly configured hosts; if you are legitimately trying to send e-mail to this site (or to a site for which we provide backup mail services) and are unable to, send mail to the postmaster and we will investigate.
If you're looking for quality spam filtering, we suggest the spambayes project; it is one of the best anti-spam packages we've seen. It learns from your personal mail traffic, making it very accurate. Still relatively young, but there is an Outlook plugin. Mozilla Thunderbird is another very good email client that contains adaptive spam filtering.
We report spam via Spamcop. You don't have to be a mail administrator to use Spamcop, and it does offer a free service, so we encourage end users to report spam themselves. We occasionally manually block open relays, but that's the only thing we do that you can't, and we don't always do that.
If you feel you need the the help of the postmaster to deal with a piece of spam, please follow the dos and don'ts below. If you don't, we may not be able or willing to help you.
- Do send us the entire spam within 72 hours.
- Do include both the body text and the extended headers.
- Do be sure you didn't "opt-in" to a mailing before reporting it as spam.
- Don't forward if your mail client inserts carets or other quote marks at the beginning of a line, because Spamcop can't process forwards. Redirect or copy instead.
- Don't ask us to complain about spam that came to you through a mailing list. Send the complaint to whoever administers the mailing list instead.
- Don't send us spam that came through a forwarding address (e.g., pobox.com). We cannot reliably block spam from forwarding servers without blocking all mail from the service.
- Don't tell us how much you hate spam. We hate it too.
- Don't tell us it's our fault that your email address got spammed. We don't give out email addresses to spammers because we hate them too.
- Don't expect to enter into a protracted argument with someone about whether you got spammed. We will complain, and if we see a reason we may block the spammer, but we won't argue beyond that.
We are doing our part to enjoy a spam-free internet. Please do your part too.
last updated 29 September 2006 by Harald Koch.
This document was borrowed, with permission and our thanks, from Ginger Stampley and Michael Croft, and modified to match local policies.