Ladies and Gentlemen, This has been an extremely difficult day for me personally and professionally due to many issues we had. Without going into the painful details, let me assure the community my original post was for exactly for the reason I posted - and we do indeed know how to run a standards compliant mail system. A side effect to the problems encountered was an inability to send a valid IP address among other things to operate the mail system and instead sending a static LB IP address, which effectively made all our mail look, as Mr.Sprunk so eloquently phrased, suspicious looking. We are over the hump - lost a tremendous amount of credibility and the opportunity to show "the government at work". The FTC has put their all into this project and the associated laws which I would hope all of you anti-spam police would appreciate. My apologies to the community for all the trash email this fiasco has produced, but more so to my customer for not delivering the quality they deserve. -----Original Message----- From: Stephen Sprunk [mailto:stephen@sprunk.org] Sent: Friday, June 27, 2003 6:10 PM To: LeBlanc, Robert Cc: Callahan, Richard M, SOLGV; North American Noise and Off-topic Gripes Subject: Re: National Do Not Call Registry has opened Thus spake "LeBlanc, Robert" <Robert.LeBlanc@savvis.net>
"It's very difficult to make the technology work... Spam blockers are automated and the software rules are arbitrary," he said.
It's a shame the press are putting the blame for this on anti-spam software, as it's clear that the DoNotCall.gov people have brought the problem on themselves by not running a standards-compliant mail system. What's worse is they knew this was coming and didn't do anything to prevent it! It appears Mr. Callahan's message to nanog wasn't to look for advice on how not to trigger spam filters -- it was to beg us to add his systems to our whitelists so his suspicious-looking mail would go through. Looks like a case of "Good enough for government work" in action. S Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking