Spam is unwanted email.  It is junk mail, sometimes advertising legitimate but stupid businesses, mostly advertising X-rated web pages or financial scams.  Spam is the 90's version of the chain letter and con artist and boiler-room phone bank all in one.

During December 1997, one or more bulk spam senders found a way to send mail as if it was coming from exmsft.com.  This had two results.  First, mail from exmsft.com was banned from a number of major sites, until we could secure our systems and explain the event to those sites.  Second, as part of securing the exmsft.com site we had to restrict whose mail we would send.  Previously, sending mail from exmsft.com was very easy.  Our SMTP server, the piece that takes mail from you and sends it out to the world, would take anyone's outbound mail.  Now, we only accept mail from known places.   Since SMTP is not a secure protocol, the only way to "know" who is handing SMTP mail is to check their network address.  Hence the need for me to know your IP address.

If you are getting a lot of spam, and you are a Washington State resident, check out the WA CPD Junk Email page.  You have some protection under state law against unsolicited email which has a misleading subject line, or misleading or forged headers.

Copyright © 2000, Paul Canniff.