Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2001 07:28:00 +0200 (MET DST)
From: Anders Andersson <andersa@DoCS.UU.SE>
To: alik@comintern.ru
Subject: Re: http://www.desctopsticker.net
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.21.0107240500530.20160-100000@radha.it.uu.se>
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Alexander, thank you for your detailed response!  While I may not
agree with your position on a couple of issues, getting a response
at all from you definitely speaks in your favour.  You wrote:

>However, we do not interfere with the way our customers use
>services and resources they obtain elsewhere, leaving this between
>them and the providers of the said services. It is like, for example,
>if someone violates driving rules with their car, it does not mean
>that no landlord may let that person rent a flat to live in.

I agree with your analogy, but I don't agree with your conclusion
that you cannot interfere with the way your customers use the
services of others.  A landlord may very well refuse to let a
person rent a flat, if that person scares away other tenants (say,
by being involved in drug trafficking and attracting odd visitors
at night, or by otherwise giving the residential area a bad
reputation), even if his activities causes no direct physical harm
to the landlord's premises.  Whether the drugs are physically
exchanged in that flat or outside the premises is hardly of major
importance, as long as the identity and address of the person is
generally known and therefore an embarrasment to the landlord.

Among other things, hosting web sites that are promoted by spam may
be reason for MAPS to list your IP addresses in the RBL (Realtime
Blackhole List), something that could affect your e-mail operations.
See <URL:http://mail-abuse.org/rbl/candidacy.html#ByAssociation> for
their policy on this.  I don't necessarily agree with their position
in every detail, but I want you to be aware of the strong reactions
from people subjected to junk e-mail, so that you can protect your
own business accordingly.

>Moreover, technically, mentioning a site in an e-mail does not certify
>that the sender had been authorized to do so by the site owner, and
>the site owner is responsible.

Agreed, and I don't expect you to take every report of one of your
customers' web sites being mentioned in spam as evidence of your
customer being a spammer, but you may want to investigate by asking
your customer about it.  There is too little financial incentive
for anybody else to harass the average web site owner in this way
to explain the majority of spamvertised web sites.  The theoretical
possibility that your customer is innocent does not relieve you of
your moral responsibility to do any investigation at all, in case
you accept the position that your customers should not spamvertise
web sites hosted by you.

>However, as a means of concession to help oppose really annoying
>activity on the Internet, we do require that our customers don't cause
>complaints about continued unrequested mailings to a person who had
>specifically demanded not to send them any. That is, the following
>quoation:
>
>AA> If you wish to unsubscribe please send a letter to unsub@desktopsticker.net
>
>is required to be a true statement, and "cease orders" sent there are
>required to be paid heed to by our customers, if they really do make
>questionable use of e-mail services elsewhere.

I consider such removal instructions to be a clear indication of
spam when sent to anybody but a voluntary mailing list subscriber.
I will not object to people sending me occasional e-mail simply to
contact me on any subject, but in that case I expect them to pay
full _human_ attention when I reply, something they can't possibly
do if they send mail to hundreds of recipients simultaneously.  If
they have set up a special "removal" service (possibly automated),
it's a direct admission that they are running a mailing list, and
they have no business adding my address to a mailing list without
me first asking for it.  Therefore, e-mail of this kind will be
immediately forwarded to SpamCop, regardless of content.  I know
which mailing lists I have subscribed to, and I will not tolerate
anyone asking me to unsubscribe from anything else.

Whether the removal procedure works or not is relevant only if the
mailing list is indeed comprised of voluntary addressees, and I will
have a lot more patience with a malfunctioning mailing list I asked
to be on, than with a stranger who "allows" me to unsubscribe from
something I've never heard of before.

As this particular spam wasn't sent via your network, I will not
hold it against you, but I suggest not advising your customers to
put "removal instructions" in unsolicited e-mail (if that is indeed
what you do; I'm not sure exactly what you are trying to tell me).
They belong in solicited e-mail only, i.e. newsletters and other
mailing lists individual Internet users have subscribed to by their
own will.  I recommend <URL:http://mail-abuse.org/manage.html> as a
basic set of rules for good mailing list management; you can either
point your customers to it or write your own rules based on it.

Getting back to the original message I asked you about, why did you
tell SpamCop the issue was "resolved" (if that is indeed what you
did), when all you appearantly did was to look at the spam and
conclude that your customer was innocent?  I don't have detailed
information about the options SpamCop makes available to web site
operators in dealing with cases of spam reported to them, but it
should be possible to let SpamCop know that you don't consider the
reported URL your problem, that you don't intend to act on it, and
that you won't be interested in further reports about it.  Your
"resolved" response instead suggested to me that you had at least
warned the guilty customer not to be found spamming again, which
appearantly wasn't the case though.

While I'm still skeptical that a "not interested" response is the
appropriate response with respect to the Desktop Sticker web site
(it rather applies to well-known government web sites and other
famous addresses mentioned in the spam simply to give it a more
reputable look, or as decoys to send anti-spammers chasing the
wrong guys), it's your choice, and I will not argue with you over
it for the time being, since it wouldn't constitute efficient use
of my time.  Your response has in fact been very helpful to me in
developing my own position on this matter, for which I thank you.

Best Regards,
Anders Andersson, Dept. of Computer Systems, Uppsala University
Paper Mail: Box 325, S-751 05 UPPSALA, Sweden
Phone: +46 18 4713170   EMail: andersa@DoCS.UU.SE