AMSTERDAM, The Netherlands; May 30, 1997: EUnet International BV, Europe's leading backbone Internet provider today announced a comprehensive program to protect it's users against unsolicited mass e-mail, popularly referred to as "spam".

"Spamming is definitely getting to be a real problem. The handful of unscrupulous people engaging in this deplorable and unlawful practice are causing our customers a lot of damage in terms of time and resources. It actually hurts the whole Internet business by driving away users and hampers acceptance of electronic commerce", says Johan Helsingius, Director Product Development, EUnet International BV. "We strongly support and encourage efforts to extend existing junk fax legislation to cover spamming, but also feel that extensive technical countermeasures have to be deployed to protect our customers".

"Since we started deploying the blocking system, we have registered hundreds of thousands of blocked attempts from the spamming systems directed towards addresses within our network. Those messages would all have ended in the mailboxes of our customers if they hadn't been blocked at our routers", notes senior networking engineer Koen De Vleeschauwer at the EUnet Network Operations Center in Amsterdam.

The technical methods deployed consist both of special modifications to EUnet mail systems, detecting the forgeries and unauthorized attempts to use third party mail relays to distribute the spam mailings, and an automatic blocking list to isolate known spamming sites, based on the BGP4 "blackhole feed" from Paul Vixie, a networking expert and anti-spam activist who maintains a list of Internet addresses that are originating spam.

"The black hole list is not a punitive measure", notes Paul Vixie. "I want to educate providers who would otherwise not care, and I want to keep spam out of my own inbox. Blackholing is not done out of vengeance but rather as a natural consequence of spammer's uncooperative activities."

"There is no committee and no deliberative process. Blackholing is done as a result my personal value judgements, made by me alone. A warning is always sent before blackholing someone, but if their internic data is out of date or their mailer is misconfigured (such that there is no "postmaster" address at their domain), warnings can be lost. Most often they are simply ignored."

"Anyone who calls me on the phone to ask for help with their spam problem (either as a source or as a relay) does not belong on the black hole list", says Paul Vixie.

Johan Helsingius notes: "Paul Vixie is really doing a very important and commendable job. You have to remember it is purely voluntary - Paul has more than one job. His anti-spam efforts are personal, unrelated to his role in the Internet software consortium or Vixie Enterprises. Paul Vixie donates a lot of normally-billable consulting time to ISP's to help them upgrade to no-relay mailers, and rewrite AUP's, and we strongly support and applaud Paul's work."

In addition to the technical and administrative countermeasures, EUnet International BV is also participating in international efforts to address the problem by updating and adapting existing legislation to cover junk e-mail. EUnet International BV strongly supports groups such as The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE), who have drafted an amendment to the US federal law that bans unsolicited fax advertisements, to extend it to cover unsolicited Email advertising on the same terms (see http://www.cauce.org/).

About EUnet

For more info:

The pr-agency Jos van den Berg/Arie Kleijn Communicatie CV
Phone: +31 70 351 24 64

Paul Vixie: paul@vix.com