Slauson Transmission Parts
Email acceptance policy and practice

Introduction

Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE also known as "spam") is a growing concern for everyone using doing business on the Internet, and that includes Slauson Transmission Parts.

This document serves several purposes and addresses three types of readers:

  1. Someone who was directed to this document, particularly anyone who had difficulty sending mail to slauson.com.
  2. A site administrator at a site that is prevented from sending mail to (or through) Slauson.
  3. A Slauson employee who wants to know what we are doing about spam.

Contents

What does site blocking mean

Site blocking means that our email hubs which process all incoming email to Slauson Transmission Parts refuse to accept mail from blocked sites (with the exception that mail may be accepted if addressed to special addresses such as postmaster@slauson.com or abuse@slauson.com).

Slauson Transmission Parts' central mail hubs will simply reject mail connections from blocked sites. The sending site will be given a message to be passed back to the sender to see this policy document.

Site blocking appears to sometimes hurt legitimate users. Why do it?

By blocking a site, Slauson Transmission Parts' network connectivity is reduced. Suppose site A gets blocked. That does not mean that only the spam is blocked from that site, but that (almost) all email from that site is blocked. This may very well include legitimate users who have legitimate correspondence Slauson. This hurts both the legitimate users at the blocked site and Slauson.

In general, Slauson Transmission Parts shares the view of many Internet systems managers as expressed by the rationale for the blocking system

Note that merely filtering spam or "just hitting delete" actually makes things easier for the spammer. It puts no pressure on the spammer to not send to tens of millions of addresses. And remember, it is often easier for a spammer to send mail to millions of addresses than to send to a smaller carefully selected list. So isolating those parts of the network that profit from spammers, is the only way to put pressure on the spammers themselves.

What to do if you are an affected legitimate user

First get in touch with your site's Email support people and refer them to this document. Pass on to them all of the details which lead you to believe you are from a blocked site. That will probably include an email "non-delivery report" (NDR), that is the bounce or error you got when you tried to send mail to Slauson Transmission Parts.

Email from most blocked sites may still be sent to postmaster@slauson.com or Abuse@slauson.com. If you have legitimate business with Slauson, then we will gladly configure our system to allow mail from you. We will probably need a copy of the bounce message and possibly other details in order to do that.

What do we block?

Currently (May 2003) we block mail connections from sites listed in the Spamhaus Block List (SBL).

We do not accept mail from misconfigured sites that have been hijacked for sending spam. These "open relays" or "open proxies" are poorly administered sites which have been exploited by spammers for sending spam. We make use of Monkey's Unsecured Proxies List and of the Open Relay Database.

Additionally, Slauson.com does not accept mail connections which come directly from the temporary dial-up addresses from most ISPs. This should not have any noticeable effect on legitimate users.

Naturally we block mail of anyone trying to relay through slauson.com. That is, anyone not on our network who attempts to use our mail servers to mail off of the network will see a "Relaying denied" message. If you are part of Slauson Transmission Parts, and believe that you are getting that message in error, please contact postmaster@slauson.com.

Reprise: What to do if you are blocked

If you are not a spammer and you are blocked we can manually "whitelist" your system.
  1. Please contact us (mail to postmaster should get through) or by phone or fax. Please provide us with the IP address of your system. We will configure our system to allow mail from your system.
  2. Please ask your network administrator to fix whatever problem causes you to be listed. If Slauson Transmission Parts is blocking email from your network, it is likely that others are too.
  3. Slauson Transmission Parts cannot remove you from the third party lists that we use. We can (and will) make a exceptions to allow your listed mail to reach us, but to be removed from one of those lists, you will have to follow the instructions of that list administrator.

If spam comes from Slauson.com

If you believe that there has been any network abuse from the slauson.com network, please notify abuse@slauson.com immediately. Keep in mind that email is very easy to forge and that mail which may appear to be from us may have nothing to do with us.

A final note to users and site administrators everywhere

The use of blocking lists should produce a noticeable reduction in spam at a fairly low cost, however it will not eliminate it and a substantial portion will continue to get through. We will continue attempting to tag that mail for easy disposal.

We adopt this site blocking policy not only because of the local spam reduction it will lead to, but because if enough other sites on the network did the same, then the cost to spammers and the hosts that support them would become high enough that there really would be a substantial reduction of spam on the network as a whole. We hope that our customers will support this effort.


Phone: 800 421-5580 7am-5pm PST
Fax: 310 548-6516

Send site comments to: webmaster@slauson.com
Send sales inquires to: sales@slauson.com