Anti-spam Measures

---

• What is spam?
• What does AFN do about spam?
• How does this affect me?
• Is there another way to explain this?

What is spam?

Unsolicited commercial email (UCE), more commonly known as "spam," is a growing problem in the Internet. If you have used the Internet for any length of time, you have probably received solicitations via email to purchase products or services. For more information on spam:

• Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email

What does AFN do about spam?

Effective January 1, 1998, our email server only allows incoming mail for AFN users and outgoing mail from AFN dialups and servers. In more technical terms, we'll prevent relaying through our email server.

This measure will reduce the load on our email server and make it easier to deal with UCE.

However, this does not mean that AFN users will never receive spam. Use of AFN as a "relay" had generally been to deliver junk mail to people on other systems. Our measures do not currently prevent all incoming junk mail for AFN users.

How does this affect me?

Local users who dial in to AFN terminal servers to establish dialup/PPP/SLIP connections will notice no difference.

Users who telnet into AFN from a remote system and use PINE will also not notice any difference.

Users who are establishing their dialup connections via other network service providers and then attempting to use the AFN email server (smtp.afn.org) will notice that they cannot send mail. There will be an error message that may resemble:

The recipient "user@foo.org" is not acceptable to your SMTP server.

The solution to this problem is to change the SMTP server entry in your browser or POP/IMAP program from smtp.afn.org to an SMTP server designated by your local network service provider. You don't need to change the address for your POP or IMAP server however.

All AFN users may receive spam from time-to-time from other systems. We can not, for example, prevent another AFN user from mis-guidedly spamming his fellow users. Though we can re-educate them. :)

Is there another way to explain this?

Here's another way to look at this. Consider your local branch post office. This is the AFN email server.

• To pick up your mail, you go to the branch and open up your PO box which is outside and thus available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. At AFN, you do this with POP or IMAP with no restrictions.

• To send mail, you enter the lobby and interact with the postal clerk. At AFN, this is our SMTP server. Basically, we're restricting the use of the lobby to only local residents. That way our branch office stays efficient and it's easier to track down mail fraud.

That's really all there is to it.