Email Abuse Prevention at Alentus

Alentus is committed to preventing spam and other forms of email abuse. We believe that spam, unwanted bulk commercial email or any other unsolicited and unwanted e-mailing activity is undesirable on our network and on the Internet in general.

To help prevent unwanted email messages we take active measures to prevent it from entering and leaving our network. We use a number of techniques including real-time blocking lists, relay blocking and other methods of prevention.

Persons using our network are subject to our restrictions and other controls to prevent email abuse. We maintain a strict anti-spam policy that prohibits all of spam-related activity by users of our network. Persons who violate these policies face action by us that may include suspension of services, account termination and legal action.

The remainder of this document is intended provide information and answer common questions regarding our email abuse policies and procedures. For more information on terms of use for our network please see our Terms and Conditions page.

Reporting Spam Incidents

Despite our best efforts, please keep in mind that it is difficult for us to filter all unwanted messages and yet guarantee delivery of all legitimate messages. Among other things, the bad server lists are not always up to the minute and often offending servers do not get listed until after the incident has occured. For this and other reasons you may still receive some spam to your email account.

If you are receiving unwanted messages the best recourse it to contact the owner of the network sending the messages and have them put a stop to the activity. If you are able to identify the source of the spam, please lodge a complaint directly to the service provider sending the spam rather than to us.

Complaining to the sender rather than the receiver is the most effective way to fight spam. For help in determining the service provider of the source of spam, you may wish to refer to the page at:

http://www.stopspam.org/email/headers/headers.html

If you believe unwanted messages are originating from the Alentus network, please contact our support staff using the forms in the Alentus Support Center. If you do not have a Alentus Support Center account, you can submit a general inquiry via support[at]alentus.com. Also, be sure to retain a copy of the offending message including the mail headers. This information will most likely be required by us in order to take any preventative action.

Preventing Unwanted Messages

As mentioned above, one method we use to prevent unwanted messages from reaching our network is blocking connections from suspicious servers. This is primarily done by using real-time lists or databases that contain IP addresses and names of servers believed to be responsible for sending unwanted messages.

Our primary mail servers will consult several such lists before accepting a remote connection from any other mail server wishing to deliver a message to an email account hosted by us. If the other mail server is found to be on a list, the connection is refused and the message will not be delivered.

Although using bad server lists is an excellent means of preventing unwanted messages, it also has potential for blocking legitimate messages as well. Often a server will end up in a list due to an isolated incident and will remain their after any unwanted activity has been stopped.

If you find that you are not able to receive legitimate email from a server that is being blocked, the best thing to do is to contact the owner of that server and let them know. The lists we use are run by responsible persons and they will usually remove legitimate servers from their database upon request by the owner of the server.

Please note that we cannot remove other peoples mail server from any of the lists. Normally, this must be done by the server owner and they may need to demonstrate that all unwanted activity has indeed been stopped. For more details on removing a server from a particular list, please consult the list managers web site .

If you are hosting with us and you cannot receive mail from a particular server and you need to do so immediately, you can contact our support department and ask us to move your email services to another server. We have multiple mail servers and we can usually move you to another mail server that can receive mail from a particular server.

Email Address Privacy

One important method of minimizing unwanted messages is by limiting knowledge of your actual email addresses. It is recommended that you ensure that only trusted persons and organisations have your real email addresseses. If you are not sure how someone has managed to get messages into your inbox, please keep in mind that there are number of techniques of doing this, many of which do not need to know your actual email address.

There are ways to find your domain name (eg: WHOIS lookup) and often it is quite easy to trick the server into accepting unwanted messages. We recommend setting your mail services to bounce messages to unknown users and otherwise limit the release of your email account information where possible.

A common method of finding email addresses is to search a persons web site looking for "mail-to" tags or email addresses publically posted. Unfortunatly, there are a number of tools available that make this task very easy and require little or no skill to use. To avoid having your email address "harvested" from your web site, you might want to replace public email-based procedures with alternate means of communication such as feedback forms, live chat systems or forum software and remove all mail-to tags and listed email addresses from your web site.

You may also want to consider removing email addresses from other documentation such as brochures, business cards or public advertisments. Once an account starts receiving unwanted messages, it is almost impossible to stop it. The spammers collect, trade and sell addresses and once yours is on their lists there is no end to the number of people who may end up with it.

For our part, Alentus does not disclose confidential client information such as customer email addresses to any third parties for any reason at any time. The only exception to this policy is with respect to co-operation with law enforcement agencies. We do not sell, distribute or otherwise disclose email addresses we have on file.

More Information

For more information on other organizations fighting spam and other unwanted bulk email, the following sites are a good place to start:

http://www.spamcops.org
http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/tskirvin/nana
http://spam.abuse.net/
http://members.aol.com/emailfaq/emailfaq.html
http://www.cybernothing.org/faqs/net-abuse-faq.html

Article ID: 24, Created: March 8, 2011 at 1:33 PM, Modified: January 8, 2013 at 12:25 PM

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