New Broad-Block List
Jack L. Stone, Publisher

 

INTRODUCTION

s an Internet-based publication, we conduct almost 100% of our correspondence with our readers and visitors using email and have been doing so for more than seven years, as of last month’s anniversary issue online. And, it has been a joy to communicate in this manner—and an extremely efficient way to communicate back and forth with our authors, especially with the ability to attach large manuscripts and illustrations that can be assembled for each month’s issue of the antenneX publication. In fact, we also do books in this same manner, transferring many megabytes of data at high speeds during the process. Thus, the email system has enabled, quick, efficient communications better than all other methods, in my opinion—and has enabled us to bring fresh, new information to our readers to almost 200 countries more quickly and at the instant we publish it on our website. This was not possible before in remote regions of the world.

 

But, as most folks know, spammers and malicious spreaders of viruses and/or any other intrusive email have spoiled that wonderful efficiency enjoyed through the email system we once knew.  Now, more than 60% of TOTAL emails are spam, compared to only 8% just TWO years ago! I can remember how upset folks would get seven years ago if a single unsolicited email wound up in their inbox—oh, if only those days would return!

 

SPAM GROWTH NOW AT 60%
Obviously, the growth of spam has been super-explosive and has caught hundreds or thousands of mail servers around the globe unprepared to do much about it. Some mail servers handle hundreds of emails daily while others handle millions. One server administrator tells me they have an average of 60 million emails a day and 32 million are spam! Of course, however large or small the mail server business, the proportions are about the same. The problem looms just as large for the administrator of a smaller mail server as with the larger ones. Their customers/users fuss just as loud at them both and want the unwanted emails to stop showing up in their inbox. What a tremendous waste of resources involved, in misuse of hardware, bandwidth, and people-time, all of which costs money—a wild guess would be well in excess of a billion dollars in wasted assets annually!

 

The first sad thought that comes to mind is that there was talk of plans for Congress to pass a bill approving the use of emails as a legitimate basis for “contractual receipt” as was done with Faxes several years ago. This would mean that an email and/or its attachments would be considered as a binding bone fide transaction—a more efficient way to conduct commerce. But, with the chaotic state the email system is in at the moment, this is highly unlikely to happen anytime soon because, to conduct business, the email system must be a steady, reliable system—at least as reliable as using a Fax machine. Alas, we have another casualty of the war with spam!

 

BLAME THE SPAMMERS

Lest anyone get the wrong idea about where I’m going from the above preamble, first, let’s all realize the ones to blame for spoiling the email environment are the spammers!

 

Unfortunately though, because so many mail servers and their administrators have been caught unprepared to deal with so much spam when the floodgates opened up, some have pushed the panic button(s) and are making the situation worse than it needs to be. Indeed, there are a number of “tools” available to the administrator that can help slow down the flow of spam. And, spam fighting tools get better and better with time.

 

By spam fighting tools, I mean those programs specifically designed for the purpose of identifying and tagging spam upon arrival at the mail servers. These programs must be installed and configured to work in concert with the main mail programs on the servers—mail transfer agent (MTA) and mail delivery agent (MDA) primarily. The mail user agent (MUA) is the program on the user’s PC that goes and retrieves the emails from the mail server for reading on the PC—that would include ALL emails, good stuff and bad stuff, allowed to enter your mailbox on the mail server.

 

The big job for the mail server is to be able to distinguish between good and bad stuff. Usually, this distinction is made by “tagging” the emails identified as spam. That is, IF the proper tools have been installed at the mail server. This tagging is placed somewhere on each of the emails by the mail server spam program, usually in the subject line. This then allows the user’s MUA to filter the good from the bad by setting up filters based on the tags. In other words, your email program could filter and divert the spam to a spam folder during the email retrieval process. Then you can take a further look at the spam before deletion, if desired.

 

In theory, the above would be a good scenario in a perfect world—meaning if each and every mail server employed the same or similar approach to spam—and that approach made everyone happy. But, that is not the case for the moment and approaches are all over the map, from no spam filtering to such extreme overkill that it takes the emails of many good guys down with the bad guys. So, we have a wide filtering spectrum from none (0) to too much (10), making the email system very unreliable. At least previously when you got your spam, you got all of your good emails too. Now—maybe not.

 

For this discussion, we have a filtering scale of 0-10 with neither end of the scale being preferable.  A well-configured mail server armed with the proper tools—and with those tools optimally configured—will let emails flow effectively and efficiently from sender to final intended recipient (mid-point of our scale?). There’s the rub though. What is optimum from all viewpoints? Well, all we know is that it’s probably not “0” and probably not “10” either.

 

MAIL SERVERS

Within our 0-10 scale, there are different purposes for different types of mail servers. The most common server might be an ISP (Internet Service Provider), ranging from the very large to the small size. Their main business and source of revenue may depend heavily on email customers. Some also do hosting of web sites and earn income subsidies from that. Hosting companies usually provide “free” emails accounts with their main income source coming from the hosting.

 

Going back a few years, pure ISPs as we knew them were primarily providers of local-call dialup connections and offered a small amount of “personal website space” as an inducement to use their dialup services. If someone needed more substantial web site space, they could use a hosting company that could be located just about anywhere on the planet. To gain access to that remote hosting company to upload web content, one would first connect to the local ISP to then connect to the Internet to reach the hosting company’s server and the web site on the other side of the planet. That is, unless one is lucky enough to find a local, competitive, reliable hosting company.

 

Today, there are more local choices, such as broadband from the local phone company’s DSL and TV’s Cable. Power company lines are coming next as local broadband ISPs. Those ISPs are doing much more hosting now, whereas the pure hosting companies that cannot provide a local connection in your city must still look primarily to web hosting services and perhaps web design services.

 

Mail servers are also maintained on premises for companies, their business activities, and their employees. Some organizations may have their own mail servers. Many of these have company-owned domains and do their own web hosting on their company-owned servers. Likely, these examples still need a local ISP for the Internet connection to the server(s), having several broadband sources in the larger cities. Broadband speed is essential when operating servers over the Internet and serving pages and/or email.

 

Closer to home, antenneX is the sole reason that compelled us to set up our first server and join the Internet business and activities more than seven years ago. Within a few months, we found that we were also in the hosting and email business once some of our professional friends learned we had the facilities. While we do not aggressively seek the hosting side of the business, it has grown in spite of that attitude so that we now have nearly a dozen servers, three of which are mail servers—all running a powerful UNIX platform. We were mainly concerned with providing facilities for antenneX, which was enjoying its own explosive growth—now marking over 3.3 million visits from almost 200 countries.

 

In addition, we have found ourselves managing all of the UNIX servers for ISPs in Dallas, Texas and Los Angeles, California, USA. My purpose for mentioning this detail is to demonstrate that we are quite familiar with the Internet mechanics on both sides as a busy user and as server administration, with outside users as well as handling several hundred thousand emails monthly over a number of networks and mail servers. This is sufficient background to examine the ailments that now exist in the email system.

 

DO YOU WANT TO DECIDE WHAT EMAILS TO RECEIVE?

Here is the main issue for this discussion. As I have stated earlier, some mail server administrators have been caught by surprise and overwhelmed with the recent explosion of spams—and the angry customers finding their inboxes containing more spam than ham.  (Yes, coincidentally, good emails are referred to as “ham” in the server vernacular).

 

If the administrator hasn’t yet installed some of the new spam-fighting tools now available for servers, what can they do? Well, they can just ignore it and let the chips fall where they may, or they may apply some of the basic handles available within the MTA main mail program, which are really too broad for this purpose.  Dealing with email issues is a very time-consuming effort and may require more time or budget than available. Without the proper tools, it is hardly possible to handle the problem of separating the spam from the ham on an effective-efficient scale.

 

The administrator finds him or herself faced with a dilemma: add more support staff to deal with the problem or try and ignore the problem—or something in between—or mostly what is affordable.

 

I am reluctant to appear in the least critical of those overloaded folks who run mail servers, because they must do what management dictates—or their budget dictates—or time allows—or any and all of the preceding. But, analyzing what we see from a strictly mechanical standpoint, some use wide blocks that penalize the innocent as well as the bad guys causing a very unreliable system of mail delivery. This trend is going in the wrong direction!

 

You may not be receiving all of your emails and not even know it, which would be primarily from use of bad spam-control policies, such as those “wide-block” techniques that deprives the innocent of their emails without being so advised by the mail server. With the least technical details possible, I’ll try to explain what I mean by wide blocking, with the understanding that I refer to those techniques used without the recipient’s knowledge, and give the user no choice in the matter.

 

Mailbox Quotas:

I discussed this one perhaps a year ago in one of my previous columns. If you don’t know that your mailbox has a limit, any emails sent to you after it reaches that limit will be bounced. Once you empty the mailbox, emails can be received again. So, it’s a good idea to check your emails frequently. You may have always had a limit, but the abrupt explosion of spam may be using up that quota faster. Things are not the same as two years ago.

 

IP Network Address Blocks

This one gets a little more technical, but let’s use a fictional example. Let’s say that your ISP’s network possesses an (Internet Protocol) address block of IPs such as 200.200.200.201-254 (an IP is like a house address). In simple terms, this means the ISP has a network block of 250+ IP addresses (201-254). When a user logs in to the ISP, a random address available is assigned to that user for the duration of the time connected. That’s a “dynamic” IP address, as opposed to a “static” address commonly used by Internet domains. A domain wants to be found and prefers to use a static address that is very much like a “house address.” It’s always the same. (I will not go into those domains that use a special service that resolves a dynamic IP, which is less expensive).

 

Now, let’s say that the domain’s static (fixed) IP address is one of those from the ISP’s network range and that the IP is 200.200.200.244 and it’s domain name resolves to “example.com.” Thus, when you put “www.example.com” in your web browser, it is always found by the Internet to be located at that one single IP address of 200.200.200.244. For this example, so is “mail.example.com” if it serves email accounts, which is our main issue here. Not meaning to make things more complicated, but the mail.example.com can have a different IP of its own separate from the web site, but again, it would be static (for instance, the antenneX domain is spread over 4 different IPs, and 4 physical servers, for various services: web, mail, downloads and secure server-SSL).

 

Let’s assume that  “mail.example.com” runs a mail list for its members or customers. It is a method commonly used to communicate with a large group where the message is the same. This is referred to as “bulk mailing.” Unfortunately, spammers use bulk mailing, too, and this is where our “problem” lives and why the “wide block” occurs.

 

Our overloaded, bewildered system administrator is tired of being yelled at by the users about the spam, so what can he do fast, especially if not armed with modern spam-fighting tools? The administrator decides ALL bulk mail is bad and thus can simply block the IP of “mail.example.com” which is 200.200.200.244—or, if that administrator believes the “problem” belongs to the sending ISP Network, he can block the entire IP range of 201-254—OUCH! That technique just blocked the emails of 250+ domains, most of which are probably innocent, just to nail one bad guy—so the administrator thinks.  In fact, the bulk mailer may actually be some little Church group communicating with its members (this really happened). The administrator didn’t bother to look close enough and just simply blocked any and all mail lists—not a good policy!

 

Now, the administrator could have just blocked the single IP of 200.200.200.244, which would have only penalized the one single domain—not 250+ domains. But, the administrator still doesn’t realize even that one single domain is a little church group and so, the policy remains a bad one, but less bad as only the little church is affected. BTW, that church group eventually gave up trying to get the problem fixed through that administrator and moved to another ISP. If that administrator has only simply looked.

 

TOO MANY RECIPIENTS

Here’s another example of wide blocking and one that is easier to explain. Once again, remember that a common technique used by spammers is to use bulk mailing which gives a common “handle” for the server to latch onto.

 

The main mail program has a configuration that can be activated and counts the number of recipients being sent to users handled through the receiving mail server. The number can be almost any positive integer, such as the number “10” or “15”, etc., and only the administrator knows the number. If any sender were to send a message with a number of recipients that exceeds the magic number, the message is bounced—period.

 

This method is worse than the IP-type blocking above because it will block any and all large mailings in addition to mail lists, since most are bound to exceed that small number set on the mail server. This is another very, very bad policy—unless, the user is using the email address in conflict with the policies of the mail server.

 

FRUSTRATION

I’m well aware that as an administrator of mail servers myself that I am feeling the frustrations, not only from the mail server side, but from the user side as well. On occasion, we have blocked some domains by mistake but, in our defense, we remove such blocks immediately and do not ignore the appeals of those affected. Moreover, the block(s) didn’t get there by reckless abandon or ad hoc policy. Each one was investigated or noted as having been a source of true spam. Even so, if requested, we remove the blocks but with the notice that the block will be reinstated if the spam starts up again.

 

However, because of the abrupt explosion in quantity of spam, investigating and monitoring the emails is consuming more and more time. From time to time we find that a few mail servers have placed blocks on our own IPs because we do bulk mailings to thousands on a regular basis. That is the nature of our business when you consider that we have 60,000+ visiting our web site to read each and every month. We notify our readers when a new issue is ready. We send out announcements about breaking news and new products, and we manage several discussion lists—some with hundreds, some with thousands.

 

As with other administrators, we no longer have the time to spare to deal with those mail servers that apply bad policies and expect the victims to bring it to their attention—in essence doing their job. During the past couple of years, this problem has grown worse. In our own case before wide blocking became so frequent, we would appeal to those mail servers on behalf of the recipients of our emails to remove the block on our domain. Then, things would go smoothly again—for a while—then we might find the block is back although we did not change anything! So, we have very erratic policies too! They just don’t stay fixed.

 

In extreme cases, no emails of any kind can be delivered to some ISPs—depriving some of our customers of their subscription logins and other vital order information essential to running a business. In some cases, we have resorted to emailing another friend as far away as Germany, for example, to please relay our message. Or, we resort to more expensive solutions using long-distance phone calls, Faxes or postal service. In the meantime, the customer remains in the dark. They are unaware that irresponsible and erratic policies right there at their own ISP is blocking essential emails they are expecting—probably thinking the delay is at our location. This bothers us because we like to be prompt with all customer services.

 

So, what do we do now? We have thought long and hard about various solutions, because it is inappropriate for some administrators to lay off their work onto others, no matter what the reason. Well, here’s one way this can be handled until things get better and emails deliveries are more reliable:

 

BLOCK LIST

No, not a black list—a block list. We figure those who are presently blocked will visit the antenneX web site and will be able to check the conspicuously posted block list to see if their ISP is on it. This proposed list would contain a current list of those ISPs that are wrongfully blocking our emails from delivery to their users. At least this way, those folks who use that ISP will know about the blocks and perhaps work with us to restore contact, if they so desire, by either complaining to their ISP or using a different email account available free from another source.

 

At the moment, the ISP Road Runner tops that list. In the past, on a few occasions, one of the regional “xxx.rr.com” ISPs might place a block. Between the user and us, we usually got it fixed within a few days and the block lifted. But, within the past couple of weeks, it seems that Road Runner has now placed a company-wide block. Sigh…we can no longer spend all of our valuable time trying to get a human to help fix this over and over. If only they could remember back when they prayed for a customer to come in the “door.”

 

Our block list is not the ultimate solution—just another band-aid to try and keep the mail flowing for lack of another solution with those ISPs who ignore this as being a problem. The email system is a much too valuable of a service to let it deteriorate. If we don’t all work together, we know what will happen to this valuable resource—government regulation! This is the inevitable outcome of any valuable resource that we cannot manage well for the common good of all.

 

LET’S ALL HELP PROTECT THIS VALUABLE RESOURCE

This issue is a worldwide issue. It doesn’t just affect “the other guy” — it affects anyone that uses emails—perhaps not enough yet to turn this trend around. At least our readers in nearly 200 countries will know a little more about how the email system works or doesn’t work. For one, I hope this “chaos” doesn’t get any worse because the email system is such a beautiful system when it works as designed and serves such a useful purpose in the world of communications.

 

Finally, we see some evidence of laws being passed to penalize the bad guys who spam and are the contributing force to this trend of disruption in emailing. But, it is still a question of enforcement of the new laws. Let’s hope that happens and soon!

 

Thanks for allowing me some “soapbox time” on this important issue. Your feedback welcomed. jack@antennex.com

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A BIT OF ANTENNAS

Among the 614 messages exchanged in the antenna-discussion list during April 2004, the WWVB array pictured below caught our attention. One expert, Robert Wilson who has handled engineering projects around the world, including VOA, found this one to be intriguing:

 

[...] Frankly after a lot of experience all over the world with LF antennas this is astounding. Having worked on antennas in the Boulder, Colorado area I can only conclude that they have developed some very special ground system within their 340 or so available acres. In spite of the very dry alkaline soil the numbers are remarkable. I have never measured anything even approaching this small a figure even within a few meters of the edge of the ocean. It would be very interesting to hear more details directly from the people who developed this truly remarkable system.
Sincerely, Robert Wilson, VA1AKK, AL7KK[...]