Primerelay takes a firm standing against spam. Spam costs the internet community a lot of resources and money. As a result of that we also feel the burden of spam and need to take extra measures to prevent our mail system coming to a grinding halt.
Besides that, almost all spam is sent through open relays or open proxies, without approval (and often knowledge) of the owner of those machines. To us this is nothing short of criminal behaviour.
Primerelay tries to combat spam wherever possible. That's why we give our users the tools to prevent their inboxes from being flooded with these unwanted e-mail. These tools consist currently consist of spamdetection based on the content of emails. In the short future we will also add the usage of blacklists to this.
What is spam?
The Spamhaus Project has the following definition:
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The word "Spam" as applied to Email means Unsolicited Bulk Email ("UBE").
Unsolicited means that the Recipient has not granted verifiable permission for
the message to be sent. Bulk means that the message is sent as part of a larger
collection of messages, all having substantively identical content.
Technical Definition: An electronic message is "spam" IF: (1) the recipient's personal identity and context are irrelevant because the message is equally applicable to many other potential recipients; AND (2) the recipient has not verifiably granted deliberate, explicit, and still-revocable permission for it to be sent; AND (3) the transmission and reception of the message appears to the recipient to give a disproportionate benefit to the sender.
What does Primerelay do against spam?
Primerelay offers its customers an advanced spamfilter, which can be configured seperatly for each emailaddress. The filter can either tag messages for local filtering, move detected spam to a seperate folder or block detected spam at the mailserver. The non-spam/spam threshold can also be configured per emailaddress. Customers can set up the spamfilter in the Customer Care Center.
The spamfilter uses a broad variety of techniques to detect spam. It looks inside messages, checks headers and looks up hosts delivering mail in various DNS-based blocklists. Because spammers almost daily try new tricks to evade filters the Primerelay spamfilter is contineously monitored and, if needed, adjusted.
Spamming is strictly forbidden by the Terms & Conditions of Primerelay. Any customer found spamming (through our systems or through another ISP promoting pages hosted by Primerelay) can, upon sufficient proof or complaints from the internet community, be disconnected immediatly.
More information about spam
The following sites provide more background information about spam and the worldwide battle against spam:
- Spamhaus tracks the internet's worst spammers, known spam
gangs and spam support services
www.spamhaus.org - Fight spam on the internet
spam.abuse.net - Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, European section
www.euro.cauce.org
