SPAM Policy, Blacklisting, and Technical Details
Spam, also known as Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE) is commercial communication from organizations you have not requested commercial email from or those who refuse to stop communicating after being requested to do so. Email from organizations, mailing lists, or relationships you have not asked to quit communicating with (but have had a previous relationship with) are NOT considered spam and are the responsibility of the message recipient to deal with. With that said spam is a HUGE problem on the Internet. Many sales ads sent as spam are scams containing viruses, worms, trojan horses, phishing hooks or other malicious content designed to either compromise your computer and/or identity. Malware infected spam represents one of the most dangerous security threats to individual computers and networks.
More information on what spam is, where it comes from, why it is so dangerous, and some ways in which it can be identified can be found in our What is SPAM? page on this site. This document is targeted at normal end users and hopes to help people spot problems and avoid many of the dangers associated with spam.
Jade SPAM Policy
Jade Networks has a very strict no-spam policy. This is in place to both protect our network reputation and the ability of our customers to freely communicate across the Internet. When SPAM either originates or is transferred via our network, the Jade mail servers can end up on one or more spam blacklists. This degradation in reputation results in the network being partially blocked from sending to potentially large portions of the Internet. This negatively affects not only us but our honest, non-spamming customers.
If customer originated SPAM is detected on our network we immediately take steps to disable the identified user account in question and contact the customer administrative contact. We realize that from time to time honest mistakes are made and we work with our customers to fix problem before taking more drastic action. In situations where it becomes evident that a customer is willfully originating SPAM via our network and/or involved in any other illegal activity, their account will be promptly terminated.
Countermeasures
The Jade message servers incorporate many different anti-spam technologies in order to better protect incoming messages as well as the network. As one of the main ways criminals get malware onto victims computers and networks we take email security very seriously. We use a combination of technologies including server side content filtering, virus/malware scanning, greylisting, recipient address validation, sender policy framework, and DNS Blacklists. For a more complete description of our backend countermeasures used to protect customers and the network see our SPAM Countermeasures page.
Jade SPAM Notification Messages
Spam and other fraudulent messages that get through our normal anti-spam controls and are detected are transferred to a special spam handling account. An automated system retrieves them and extracts the information about the connecting host (this is when the actual blacklisting occurs). An abuse report notification message is constructed with this information together with other diagnostic information and sent to the Jade Abuse Report account. If the submitting MTA’s public whois data includes abuse reporting addresses the abuse report is also immediately sent there as well.
The SPAM Notification messages that we send to network administrators contains a lot of information about the received spam including the spam message itself as an attachment. Our SPAM Notification Messages page describes this message format, how to interpret the various fields, and how to interpret the Internet message header of the offending message. Information is also provided to aid the remote administrator work with us to remove any blocks that may have been put in place.
SPAM DNSBL Removal Procedure
Sites who have been added to the Jade DNSBL can be removed once the spamming user has been properly dealt with. Details on how to accomplish this are found on our SPAM Blacklist Removal Procedure page.