Earthlink Advisory

9 November, 2006

We are receiving an increasing number of removal requests from Earthlink/PeoplePC customers. We have been receiving a great deal of spam from these servers.

Please note that we have made a concerted effort to contact Earthlink abuse to resolve these issues. They have failed to respond. Indeed, email to abuse results in receiving back the original email without comment. It does not appear that they are assigning trouble tickets nor taking any responsibility for the complaint.

None of our efforts have resulted in a reply from this provider, much less any corrective action. We have tried email, web forms and even an on-line chat. After 30 minutes, the best that the on-line rep could do was to refer us to feedback@earthlink.net. That address replied "EarthLink only accepts new messages created by completing our online email form" The on-line form was completed — AGAIN. Maybe you - the reader - has heard from Earthlink. We sure haven't.

If your email is being rejected, please either complain to Earthlink or find another provider; one that is more responsible and less spam tolerant. We regret any inconvenience suffered by Earthlink customers. We are trying to be reasonable and to limit “collateral damage.” Doing so is becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible.

15 August, 2006: Advisory re-escalated.

It's hard to believe that Earthlink is doing any outbound filtering at all. The amount of spam that originates from their servers is greater than any other US or Canadian ISP! PLEASE REFER all associated listing issues directly to their Abuse Department for handling.

March 8, 2006: Advisory Downgraded

The range associated with Scientology spam has been delisted. If we receive additional spam, the range will be promptly listed again. However, Earthlink remains the largest provider to broadly implement a Challenge/Response system which has the potential to create a great deal of litter since the majority of challenges are sent to the sender asserted by the spammer — which is never the actual sender. Moreover, serious questions remain about the efficacy of Earthlink's abuse and security departments.

There are two issues of importance to Earthlink subscribers:

Our listing of Earthlink IPs is a direct result of complaints about spam sent by the Church of Scientology through Earthlink. Scientology sent spam to people who specifically requested not to receive their email. Moreover, they have failed to remove rejected addresses from their lists. Poor list management (in this case an apparent lack of any list management) puts a strain on corporate servers receiving email intended for former employees, some of which has to be read prior to deletion.

We have communicated several times with Earthlink and have sent them a copy of every "removal" request yet they fail to take action or even respond. Meanwhile, the list of IPs expands.

The second problem is that Earthlink has created a challenge/response (C/R) system that subscribers can use to control spam. C/R creates far more spam than it filters. The reason for this is that the majority of spam depicts an innocent user as the sender. Thus, if a spammer does a run using my return address in the email, I may receive thousands of spam challenge messages. Most people consider those messages to be spam.

Administrators: These challenges can be detected with a sender check on from=spamblocker-challenge@bounce.earthlink.net or header checks on "Reply-to: nobody@earthlink.net"