Site Presented By
Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Ramasubramanian says he's troubled by "radical fringe" anti-spammers who firmly believe that the only way to get an ISP from mainland China to do anything at all about spam coming from their network is "to e-mail the spammer, assorted other addresses at his/her ISP, and several Chinese government e-mail accounts, and including in the message words like "Falun Gong" and "Free Tibet."
"Since the government of China supposedly filters and monitors every single e-mail sent into mainland China, the general idea of this stupid trick is to scare the admins into taking action, or get them into serious trouble with their government, all because they are unwise enough to allow spam onto their network."
Ramasubramanian's situation as the head spam fighter at an ISP based in Asia is particularly complicated and sometimes puts him squarely in the middle of many anti-spam efforts.
"Some of the most aggressive spammers around now have servers in China, India and several other countries around the world, hosted at ISPs where the management is apparently happy to do nothing as long as the dollars keep flowing in," Ramasubramanian says. "So some systems administrators have responded by blocking much or all of the traffic from Asian ISPs."
Outblaze has servers around the world, so when Ramasubramanian sees blocks that take out a wide swath of Asia he can route his users' legitimate mail through servers elsewhere. And since he's well-known in the abuse-desk world, most large ISPs try not to block Outblaze e-mail. But Ramasubramanian still spends a significant amount of time every day contacting systems administrators of smaller networks who have blocked Outblaze's servers.
"They'll see a stray item of spam from our network, learn from a Whois lookup that we are based in Hong Kong and then figure it's OK to block over 30 million users," Ramasubramanian sighs.
Laura Atkins, president of the SpamCon Foundation, an anti-spam organization, has been fighting spam since 1996. She agrees that some spam fighters sometimes don't know how to work effectively with abuse-desk staffers.
"Abuse desks are understaffed and people are overworked. But spam is such an emotional issue; it's hard not to get frustrated when you feel like you are under siege. It's important to remember that we are all on the same side here. With almost no exceptions, Internet service providers hate spam, and will cut off the spammer's connectivity when they find out about it."
And then wait for the next attack.
"The challenge we face is the same challenge little Hans Brinker faced when he stuck his finger into that dam," Ramasubramanian said. "We know that as soon as we let our collective fingers slip out of the thousands of tiny holes we are plugging we will drown in a massive sea of spam."
