Earthlink Spam

by Ed Sawicki
Accelerated Learning Center
Tailored Computers

June 15, 2006

I recently received spam from an Earthlink email server. It was addressed to one of my honeypot email addresses, so it was absolutely, without a doubt, sent by a spammer. The subject of the message was for a product that I didn't need and would never inquire about (not that I would ever brag). When I forwarded the message and headers to Earthlink, they responded with this message:

Hello,

This looks to be a misdirected email from one of our customers.

Since this, unsolicited or misdirected, email was addressed directly to you,
respond politely (so as to not instigate a potential flame-war) asking that
they stop sending the mail to your address. If it appears to be originating
from an automated list, reply to sender with either "unsubscribe" or "remove"
in the SUBJECT: line, and maybe a polite message in the body.
 
If the person/party does not desist after having been politely asked,
Earthlink reserves the right to take action, up to and including termination
of service. However we would much rather advise the user of the appropriateness,
or lack thereof, of their actions and ask that it not be repeated.
 
I would also suggest that you CC: abuse@abuse.earthlink.net any further
communication with this party.

Regards,

Mark John 
EarthLink, Inc.
Network Abuse Engineer
abuse@abuse.earthlink.net
http://www.earthlink.net/about/policies
========================

There are a few problems with this idiotic response:

  1. You should never respond to a spammer because it confirms that they are sending to a legitimate address. This will almost certainly make things worse - you'll get more spam.
  2. You shouldn't carry on a dialog with spammers because if you tick them off, they may be able to launch a distributed denial service attack against you. Your Internet conection could be down for hours or days as has happened with companies like Amazon, CNN, and Amazon.
  3. I couldn't possibly interact with every spammer I receive junk from. We get a few thousand spam messages each day.

Apparently, Earthlink has a history of not doing anything about spam from their servers as this outdated Web page reports. Scroll down to the Earthlink section of the page.

Earthlink is doing their customers a disservice by not rigorously dealing with spam being sent from their servers. If I continue to have problems with spam from Earthlink, I'm going to block them. The rejection message my server sends back will tell Earthlink customers why they're being blocked.

Back