BestPrac.Org

Stop Spam : Best Practice in Email
Spam Prevention and Eradication

About Us:

BestPrac.Org officially launched as an internet industry anti spam organization and resource in January, 2001. The real story leading up to the formation of BestPrac.Org dates back to the mid 1990's.

The founder and current Chairman, Mr. Trevor Johnson, had the experience during the 1990's of tracing spammers and identifying their service providers around the world. With the experience of researching, preparing and lodging over 30,000 abuse reports came a wealth of experience in spam tactics, network security, email server technologies and the development of many security and abuse professional contacts worldwide.

From that, the "BestPrac.Org - Best Practice in Email Spam Prevention and Eradication" initiative was eventually born.

The failure to condemn an activity is indeed, an offer of tacit approval. All it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing - Edmund Burke

In recent years, various studies have shown a growth rate in spam of up to 400% per annum, though that has by 2007 reduced to a growth rate of "only" around 150% per annum. In other words, despite many nations now having legislated anti spam laws, the volume of spam globally continues to grow at astronomical rates. We conclude that the most popular current spam-fighting methodologies are inefficient - even counter-productive. Client-side spam filter software does not stop spam. It merely hides spam from view after it has already illegally, expensively and often dangerously consumed other people's bandwidth, network resources and hardware, passing those costs onto the victims and the ISPs of the victims.

Worse still, the more client-side anti spam filters are used, the more spammers spam. Instead of sending a single spam, they now send a dozen spams with minor variations and via different IP routes in the hope that at least one will get past the spam filters and spam blockers. Thus, the use of client-side spam blockers and spam filters causes a dramatic increase in the level of spam and the consumption of bandwidth. This gives the world a more congested and slower internet experience with higher costs borne by the victims rather than the perpetrators.

In fact, with the growing use of spam filtering technologies has come the growth from the side of evil of ever more malicious ways of sending spam. The use of viruses, spyware and trojans to infect PCs means that there are now "armies" of millions of computers around the globe unknowingly and wittingly on the part of their owners spewing out spam on behalf of malevolent third-party spammers.

Certainly, abuse reporting reduces the GROWTH RATE of spam - active termination of the accounts and services of offenders serves as a deterrent to "newby" and "would-be" spammers - but all the evidence suggests that it does absolutely nothing to prevent professional offenders, including major global organized crime syndicates. With knowing and deliberate criminality, professional spammers set up strings of accounts in the foreknowledge that they will eventually be terminated. Upon termination of one of their accounts, these spammers are ready to re-spam their lists of many millions of victims again - within an hour.

Experience has taught us that there are two main factors which ensure that innocent victims' spam receipts will grow faster than their ability to defend themselves:

1. A number of ISPs (not complying with Best Practices) are in the bad habit of forwarding spam complaints (abuse reports) received on to the perpetrator, asking the perpetrator to remove the complainant from their mailing lists. The spammer will NEVER comply with such requests. The spammer sees the complainant as being an email address which is now proven as valid and active - the very lifeblood needed for a spamming operation.
2. One of the primary "products" being spam-marketed is spamming services - particularly lists of email addresses for "do-it-yourself" spammers. (Since the advent of the United States's 2004 CAN-SPAM ACT, this has become less prevalent, but has not been entirely eradicated.) Picture the scenario - A spammer sells your email address to ten people. Each of them spam you, regularly, and ALSO sell your email address to another ten people, who do the same.... You now have 111 people spamming you regularly (some daily, some weekly, some monthly). They then sell your email address to a further ten people.... and eventually, your email address is in the hands of thousands of spammers around the world. The "pyramid" nature of it is just too powerful a force for anyone to successfully and fully counteract.

Accordingly, it is time for a better approach. While we wholeheartedly ENCOURAGE all spam victims to continue to be vigilant in lodging abuse reports, BestPrac.Org is now committed to the ongoing development of a superior approach. It is our intention to continue our work of developing and encouraging industry standards aimed at the ultimate in spam protection - preventing spam ever being sent in the first place.

Many ISPs and other service providers use "blacklists" and other forms of spam filters. We don't object to them per se, but believe they are dealing with the problem AFTER most of the damage has already been done. It is time for ethical and technological solutions, particularly at the email server and network security levels along with workable and actively enforced legislated anti spam laws, aimed at preventing spam from being sent in the first place.

If you are a vigilant spam abuse reporter, or if you are involved in network security/abuse matters professionally, or if you are an "internet service provider" in the broadest sense of the term, we invite you to help us by volunteering your experience and expertise to the anti spam cause by contributing to the development of Best Practice Principles for the internet industry.

About Donations, Funding & Advertising on this site:

BestPrac.Org no longer seeks donations from supporters. While moral support has always been strong, financial support has always been poor. Accordingly, BestPrac.Org has changed to an advertising model for ongoing financial support. All advertisements on this site are selected by relevancy and displayed by a third party agency - Google Adsense - displaying advertisements for advertisers under their Google Adwords service. Accordingly, neither the policies of BestPrac.Org nor the content of this website are in any way influenced by our advertisers.

The Google Adwords service offers advertisers contextual text advertisements, graphical banner advertisement and video advertisements in a variety of different sizes, mostly on a "pay-per-click" basis, though optionally also on either a CPM (cost per thousand ad impressions) or cost per action basis.

To learn more about advertising on this site to reach a target audience of people interested in spam solutions, please visit the link directly above this sentence.

© Copyright, 2000-2010. BestPrac.Org : PO Box 2136, Strawberry Hills. NSW 2012. Australia. Ph. +61 2 9699-4860