The Online Guide to Spam Email!

Here you will find all the information you ever needed regarding spam email.  We have composed a 14 section guide below which you can browse page by page.

If you have any questions please contact our staff.

Quick Links to Our Anti Spam Features!
1. What is spam?	8. Isn't spam illegal?
2. When is spam spam?	9. How big a problem is it?
3. The term comes from?	10. What are DNS blacklists?
4. Why do people send spam?	11. What is an open relay?
5. Where did it come from?	12. How can I stop spam?
6. How did they get my email?	13. How do spam filters work?
7. Does unsubscribing work?	14. Send spam free bulk email?

 

11 of 14 - What is an open relay?

Anyone who has traveled a lot has experienced the following: You check into your hotel. You connect to the Internet using the Ethernet socket in your hotel room. You try to send an email to the office, and your email client refuses saying “relaying denied”. What happened? Suppose your email address is you@foo.bar. Your regular email server, which may be named mail.foo.bar, knows all of the IP addresses of all of the machines connected to the Internet via the foo.bar domain. Should the mail.foo.bar forward email coming from another domain than foo.bar, this is referred to as “relaying”. Most ISPs do not allow relaying of email from untrusted domains, indeed from any domains but their own. Your laptop computer was using an IP address allocated by your hotel’s DHCP server. Mail.foo.bar did not recognize this IP address, and refused to relay. There are a lot of poorly configured email servers however, that will let anyone use them to send email. An open mail relay becomes a channel for Spam, virtually “hijacked” by unscrupulous spammers who send large numbers of emails through them until they are discovered and banned, and move on to another open relay. Early versions of certain email servers did not stop spam email , but defaulted to open relaying when set up, so that there are many open relays available to spammers today. Recent versions of most email server products default to denying relaying in order to block junk email.

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