The spam police force
SpamCop
www.spamcop.net
What it does
Free service that helps users report spam to the actual sender. Fee-based service that filters spam from a user's inbox, using a blacklist and whitelist.
Who runs it:
Founded and run by Julian Haight, a consultant for several years. Haight started working on SpamCop to help fight his own spam and to practice Perl programming. He has one paid assistant and 10 volunteers.
Customers:
About 4,000 users pay for the filtering service. SpamCop receives about 50,000 complaints a day.
Haight says: "We list you immediately, and then we can talk about it."
Spamhaus
www.spamhaus.org
What it does:
Nonprofit organization in London that tries to identify professional spammers and spamware vendors. ISPs and users can query Spamhaus' list free of charge.
Who runs it: Steve Linford, a computer programmer and systems developer since the mid-1980s, is the founder and head. Linford owns a British ISP, which funds Spamhaus. There are eight Spamhaus workers - all volunteers.
Customers: Spamhaus gets 10 million queries per year to its database of spammers.
Linford says: "Since there is no police force on the Internet, you are your own police force. Everyone has the power. The Internet is not a big public network. It's a network of private networks. It's owned by the people who have paid for the equipment, and they don't want spam coming through and plaguing them."
Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS)
www.mail-abuse.com
What it does:
MAPS is a nonprofit organization in California that sells a database - or blacklist - that is used by ISPs to filter the e-mail entering their networks.
Charges:
As of July 31, MAPS stopped offering free access to its databases. ISPs now must have a signed contract with MAPS. Querying MAPS' Realtime Blackhole List would cost roughly $1,500 per year, per mail server.
Customers:
MAPS analyzed its site traffic recently and found that 22,000 ISPs queried its lists in a 24-hour period.
Size of the blacklist: MAPS estimates it has 4,700 listings on its RBL. A single listing could have 250 IP addresses on it, increasing the number of networks listed.
Who runs it: David Rand is the executive director. Rand and Paul Vixie, both Internet veterans, are the co-founders and shareholders. Vixie has stepped back from day-to-day operations to focus on his job as president of PAIX.Net.The company has 12 full-time workers, along with a volunteer task force (see question and answer with David Rand).
Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail
(CAUCE)
www.cauce.org
What they do:
CAUCE is a grass-roots coalition of Internet users and system administrators promoting a legislative solution to the spam problem.
Size of organization: CAUCE has about 30,000 members, who sign up online with no membership fee. There is a core group of about seven people who volunteer to discuss policy, speak at events and lobby legislators.
Who runs it: The chairman of CAUCE is Scott Hazen Mueller, a system administrator and consultant, who has been active in the antispam movement for about eight years.
Policy: CAUCE is pushing for federal antispam legislation. There are several e-mail spam bills now but CAUCE doesn't support any of them, saying that the bills fall short of being effective.
Quote: Co-founder and vice-president John Mozena says: "The whole point behind legislation is to remove as much of the need as possible for barbed wire and guard dogs that people throw up around their mail servers."
Brightmail, Inc.
www.brightmail.com
Size of the company: Brightmail, located in San Francisco, employs more than 90 people.
What they do: Brightmail is a fee-based service with a software component, available to service providers and enterprises, for deploying server-based filtering. The filter checks incoming e-mail messages against rule sets, which are autoupdated to customers every 5 minutes. Brightmail harvests actual spam messages via e-mail boxes positioned around the Web. Five employees, called Spam Masters, analyze the e-mail looking for spam.
Cost: Entry-level pricing for 5,000 to 10,000 mailboxes is $1 to $5 per mailbox, per service, per year.
Customers: Brightmail filters about 100 million e-mail addresses for 30 customers, including EarthLink, MSN, Excite@home and WebTV.
RELATED LINKS
Contact Features Writer Suzanne Gaspar
Other recent articles by Gaspar
The Spam Police
Spam accounts for as much as 50% of an ISP's e-mail traffic flow. Read how spam can cause damage and steps you can take to prevent it.
ISPs and spam police
Both fight spam, but they don't go about it the same way.
How the blacklist system works
File an e-mail complaint with the Mail Abuse Prevention System hotline if you think you have received spam.
Q & A with David Rand
David Rand is a founding member of Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS). He sat down with Network World feature writer Sharon Gaudin to talk about battling spam.
Antispam-related URLs
Click on these to help you prevent spam.
Spam rebel with a cause
Find out if your mail provider is using the RBL services of the cyber-goons at MAPS.
Network World, 07/02/01.
ISPs fight spam from the front line
There is little doubt that you have a grueling job when your business card reads 'senior abuse administrator.'
Network World, 05/24/01.
The spam-tastic year 2000
Unwanted spam gave one e-mail user plenty to complain about in 2000.
PC World, 01/03/01.
