View From the Bushes

Let's have a little talk about tweetle beetles...

What do you know about tweetle beetles? Well...

When tweetle beetles fight,
it's called a tweetle beetle battle.

--Dr. Seuss, Fox in Socks

Okay, I wish we were going to have a little talk about tweetle beetles, but instead we're going to have a talk about SPEWS or the Spam Protection Early Warning System.

I hate spam. I get 75-100 spam messages a day through my two e-mail accounts. But as bad as some spammers are, I'd have to say that there are anti-spammers who are worse. SPEWS is just such a group. Basically, SPEWS maintains a list of "spam-friendly" IP's. You would think that this is a list of IP's where spam has originated that you can block. But that wouldn't be early warning, would it. Let me give an example of how one would get added to the SPEWS list. Let's say 5 or so years ago some high school kid worked for a spammer for a summer. He then (in the present day) registers a domain and hosts it with an ISP. The entire address space of that ISP would then be added to the spews list.

So essentially if you use an ISP which happens to host someone who five years ago had peripheral involvement with a spammer then your address will be blocked. You're probably saying, "well I would just get in touch with them and explain. I'm sure it would be cleared up in no time." That's the problem: you can't get in touch with them. They have absolutely no contact information. No phone number, address, or e-mail. The only suggestion they offer is to post to a newsgroup, where all that will happen is that you'll be mercilessly flamed as a spam-collaborator. Now maybe by some objective standard that's not as bad as an actual porn spammer, but at least the spammer makes no claims to the moral high ground, whereas SPEWS claims to have invented it.

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Ross