This page is designed to be the definitive place for Internet Alaska's spam policies for both e-mail and news services. Unfortunately, all these precautions are not fool proof, so if you have any questions or comments please feel free to direct them to abuse@alaska.net and we will do our best to sort out whatever problem may arise.

We also have a page to help teach you about spam. It is relatively basic but is designed to help teach you how to deal with spam in a useful manner and how to minimize the amount of spam that you receive. Please read this page if you are becoming a frequent target for spam mailings. A few simple rules can help a lot.

This page will help you better understand Internet Alaska's policies to help protect our customers and the net at large from the evils of spam. If you are interested in more information on the topic below are some interesting and useful URL's.

• The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail - http://www.cauce.org/
• The SPAM-L FAQ - http://bounce.to/spam-l
• abuse.net - http://www.abuse.net/
• spam.abuse.net - http://spam.abuse.net/

Internet Alaska General Policies Regarding Spam
Internet Alaska operates a strict no tolerance spam policy.

The first time we are notified (or discover ourselves) that a customer have been sending spam, and it is verified, their account will be immediately terminated.

Anti-Relaying Policies
If you are getting an error message similar to what is below you are most likely being affected by our anti-relaying policies. There is now a page dedicated to explaining what this means, and offering some solutions. Please check it out if this is indeed what is affecting you.

Example Anti-Relaying Error Message:

550 larry@domain.com... We do not relay
see http://home.alaska.net/network/spam.cfm - larry@domain.com

Mail Server Policies
As spam has become a larger and larger problem on the internet ISP's have been forced to find new and inventive ways to combat it. There are two main components which make spam a bad thing. The first is that having unsolicited e-mail constantly arriving in your mailbox can be very annoying. Especially as the volume of spam increases the longer you've had your e-mail address, and the more widely known your e-mail address is.

The second problem is called relaying. The most common method for "spammers" to send their spam is to relay off of an unsuspecting (and unprotected) mail host. In this manner a spammer can send a vast volume of e-mail messages (often many millions of messages) to innocent people all over the net.

Now the question is what have we done to reduce the scope of these problems.

• We maintain a list of known spam domains and users from whom we will not accept mail. Because this can potentially cause a denial of service to our customers you can view the list of blocked domains and users from this page.

  If you believe that a domain or user has been listed here incorrectly please contact us and we will do what we can to resolve the problem.

• We only allow people, outside our network, to use our mail servers to send mail to our customers. What this means is that in order for our mail server to relay, the message must be either to or from one of our customers.

News Server Policies
Although it receives less attention these days from most people, spam was actually first a problem on Usenet news system. Today's Usenet news system is almost overwhelmed by the volume of spam posted to it's news groups. In order to be good "net-izens" we actively monitor our news feeds (both what arrives from the world and what our customers send out) for spam. Anything which is determined to be spam is filtered immediately.

Unfortunately this process isn't perfect and occasionally we catch a legitimate post. If you are having trouble posting a message to our news server it is most likely because your message is getting caught by one of the rules below:

• You are cross posting your message to more than ten groups.
• You are posting a follow-up which is more than seven replies deep (typically flame wars).
• You are posting a message with a binary attachment to a non-binary group.
• You have are more than ten binary encoded lines in your post to a non-binary group.
• Your post includes mime encapsulated HTML (normally a mistake by new users and considered bad 'netiquette').
• The post arrived from a blacklisted domain or IP range (this only filters incoming articles).
• Your post was generated by a known software spam package and has been detected by it's headers.
• Based on modified MD5 checksum of an article body, the server will reject anything it sees more than five identical copies of within the last day.

Almost everything we see getting rejected falls into these three categories:

• Posts from known spam friendly organizations which has been detected by domain, IP number or article headers.
• An article with too many cross posts in the jobs.* hierarchy from a head hunter agencies.
• Posts rejected because more than five copies of the same article has been posted within the last day. This is one way spammers try to get around the cross post limits, they simply post the same message to many groups a few at a time.

This page will help you better understand Internet Alaska's policies to help protect our customers and the net at large from the evils of spam. If you are interested in more information on the topic below are some interesting and useful URL's.

• The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail - http://www.cauce.org/
• The SPAM-L FAQ - http://bounce.to/spam-l
• abuse.net - http://www.abuse.net/
• spam.abuse.net - http://spam.abuse.net/

If you think that there has been a mistake please feel free to contact us for help at abuse@alaska.net .