Slauson Transmission Parts
Email acceptance policy and practice
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:
- Someone who was directed to this document, particularly anyone who
had difficulty sending mail to slauson.com.
- A site administrator at a site that is prevented from sending
mail to (or through) Slauson.
- A Slauson employee who wants to know what we are doing about spam.
Contents
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.
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
- Site blocking is by far (other than entirely ignoring
the problem) the easiest thing to implement. Alternatives would
require additional resources and additional staff.
- The only (practical) way to put pressure on the spammers
themselves is to make sites unwilling to grant network access to
spammers. Putting pressure on sites that willingly host spammers
is a very good way to ensure that sites don't willingly host
spammers.
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.
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.
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.
If you are not a spammer and you are blocked we can manually "whitelist"
your system.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 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.
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