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 <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Message-ID: <[email protected]> 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. [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] ================================================ 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