FAQ

How do you define "spam"? 

The definition of "spam" is a tricky issue, with as many strongly held opinions as many other age old questions such as "the number of angels who can dance on the head of a in" and "chicken versus egg." For example, many define spam as unsolicited electronic mail sent in bulk. Others believe "bulkness" is irrelevent, it's merely a matter of whether the message sent was solicited. Still others debate the importance of whether the message was commercial in nature.

Due to the nature of Internet email technology, each email message, whether it is bulk or not, whether it is solicited or not, whether it is commercial or not, costs the recipient more than it costs the sender in terms of both money and resources. These are facts that make the definition of spam very tricky.

In Mauritius, we have adopted the following definition where spam is referred as “Unsolicited communications sent in bulk over an electronic media such as e-mail, mobile (SMS, MMS) and instant messaging services, usually with the objective of marketing products or services.” 

Isn't spam just the same as traditional paper advertising (third class or "junk" mail)?

No. Third-class mailers pay a fee to distribute their materials. Spam is the equivalent of third-class mail that arrives postage-due. Real people pay real money, in the form of disk space charges, connect time, or even long-distance net connections, to transmit and receive junk e-mail and newsgroup postings. Unless we utterly overhaul the Internet's mail and news software to charge a mailing fee, spam is taking advantage of the cooperative nature of the Net.

Indeed, spam is most like junk FAXes, which are sent at the convenience of the sender and the expense of the recipient. With third class mail, if you don't want it, you throw it out, and it takes very little time. If you are interested, you open it. Spam email costs you and your provider money to receive whether you ever read it or not.

Then isn't spam just the equivalent of traditional telemarketing?

No. The difference again is who pays the cost - a telemarketer will have to staff up, rent phone lines, and pay monthly and often per-minute phone charges. Telemarketers cannot call collect. A spammer gets a throwaway account or a free trial disk, or signs up with a mass-mailing company, and blasts a message at hundreds of thousands of people.

In many ways spamming resembles those automated calling machines that became popular with telemarketers a few years ago. They programmed the machines to dial their way through entire prefixes, and frequently the machines hung people's phone lines and literally wouldn't go away. Likewise, spammers get email address lists and run through them. Spam can be viewed as machines harassing people in a way which is very cheap for the machine and a substantial burden to the people.

What is an open relay?

An open relay (sometimes also referred to as a third-party relay) is a mail server that does not verify that it is authorised to send mail from the email address that a user is trying to send from. Therefore, users would be able to send email originating from any third-party email address that they want.

Why is an open relay bad?

Spammers are constantly on the lookout for open relay SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) servers. They use the open relays to send unsolicited mail to a large number of email addresses, which has an impact on delivery speed, bandwidth, disk storage space, CPU processing and more.

A number of organisations are cracking down on spam originating from open relay servers by forming blacklists. Several anti-spam solutions check if the mailserver is in one of these blacklists before allowing incoming mail from it. If your mail server gets listed on one of these blacklists, a lot of the emails that you would be sending would not be reaching their destination.

What software blocks spam from open relays?

If your open relay is found by a blacklist organisation (usually if someone reports spam coming from your mail server), it would be blacklisted. There are loads of solutions (services, software and appliances/hardware) that block mail from mailservers listed in these blacklists. Many of these are implemented at a server level (eg by ISPs, company mail servers etc) even though not all client-based solutions have this feature.

If you are interested in finding software to block spam, you can browse our Anti-Spam Software & Tools Section.

How do I close my open relay?

 
If you are a system administrator interested in closing down your open relay check the Anti--Spam Tools section to access guidelines on how to protect your mail system against third-party relay.