About Matthew…
I’m 38 years old and have been working in the IT industry since 1991 where I started out by building IBM XT compatibles. In 1994/5 I joined forces with a local shop owner from my home town and became known for my ability to fix personal computers right down to the individual component level.
In 1997, I decided a small town was too small for me and that I was not going to get anywhere so I moved from one side of England to the other and took a position as a test engineer at 3Com in Cirencester. (For those with a sense of humor, my younger brother called my position a “Professional Idiot” as my job was to find new and exciting ways of breaking things.)
In early 1998 3Com decided to move the development and production of the Office Connect series router to other locations and close the Cirencester office, so I was made redundant. I moved to London, and took a position in the Morse Group, 6 months later I had had enough of the holier that thou attitude of the management, and accepted a position at Netscape Communications.
Netscape Communications really caused me to grow up, sharp and fast, already 29 years old I was arrogant, eager, and a complete know it all, little wonder I didn’t have many friends. Anyhow lots of fun ensued, decent salary, decent house to live in, resulted in a nice car (initially a Fiat X19, then a Toyota MR2) and of course this meant that trips back to my home town to see my son were possible. It was also possible for me to do stupid things like drive 200 miles to go clubbing and drive back in the same night which I did on occasion.
In 1999 on one of my impromptu nightclub trips to my home town I met Ally, who after 2 weeks, I proposed to. On February 29th, 2000 we married in Gretna Green, Scotland, and my life changed forever. Not long after the wedding my father died of prostate cancer, and Ally and I chose to emigrate to Australia, in July 2000 we landed in Melbourne.
My employment continued for Netscape Communication until November 2001 when I was made redundant at the same time as AOL closed the Australian office. My next position was at the University of Queensland as a ‘Specialist Systems Programmer’ where I suggested that the University put resources into the publicly accessible and maintained anti-spam resources. The University suggested it would not be appropriate and would be quite difficult. At around the same time, some of the University’s machines were listed as spam sources causing mail to be blocked, upon investigation it turned out to be a listing that was created because of an open proxy server elsewhere in the network. I posted to NANAE and managed to upset ‘RFG’, otherwise known as, Ronald F. Guilmette who I later found out often is easily upset at first contact. I am not known for subtlety so a clash was inevitable. Anyway to cut a long story short, I decided that the only way to argue with some of these people was to ’show them how to do it properly’ and therefore set myself a challenge. A few months later I had persuaded The University of Queensland to host my project and the SORBS daemon was created, the SORBS DNSbl following shortly there after.
So now you know, I’m an arrogant SoB and if I don’t don’t think someone is doing a good job and I am unable to pursuade them to do a good job I will set a challenge in myself to work at providing something better…. and that is the reason for this site.
More on the reason for this site…
An individual who used to be a whitehat promotes himself as the ‘DNSBL Resource‘ however it has become increasingly obvious, despite his protestation, that he is far from whitehat any more. An example, and very obvious correlation, is that I take the view spammers are thieves, they steal our resources for their own profit, this is the reason we fight spam. In a similar way the individual concerned decided it would suit his purpose to take a page that is copyright by myself and post it on his own site, without my permission, because I had previously removed the page from my site. I spoke to the ISP about the page, and the ISP told the individual to remove the page or they would. Now at this point any whitehat would have left it at that, however this individual chose instead to create a page on Google Pages and post the same content to that site with a disclaimer indicating he was exercising ‘Fair Use’. Not the actions of a whitehat. Contacting Google, they indicated they wouldn’t do anything without a DMCA takedown notice, so I issued one, the page is still there, as Google has offices in Australia, my next stop should be to issue a full law suit with damages claim against the Individual and Google here in Australia. The Berne Convention will ensure he doesn’t escape justice, such a sad thing that it has had to come to this, but rights must be preserved.
An amusing little update, after all the protestations of the same individual, here seems he’s actually got a similar problem of people stealing copyright works of his, the irony of it all.
Anyhow enough of the distasteful s**t, the other part of the other site explains a very dubious methodology which Iverson of ‘DNSBL Resource‘ uses. Dubious you may ask? Well that’s the best fitting word, the methodology basically boils down to him setting up a number of email addresses which he ’seeds’ into spam lists, and then he subscribes other email addresses to a number of mailing lists and requests messages from other sources. His definition is therefore anything he has requested is “ham” anything sent to him without a request is “spam”.
For the astute amongst you, you will realize that this method of creating ‘ham’ is fraught with significant danger of errors. The creation of ’spam’ on the other hand is quite reasonable but will by no means be comprehensive.
The dangers of using subscribed mail for ‘ham’…
‘ham’ that is based on mailing list subscriptions is dangerous as I explained elsewhere because companies that operate CAN-SPAM complaint marketing practices, which do not comply with the Australian Spam Act 2003 (eg anyone not confirming the opt-in process, and not having a prior business relationship) will be listed as a spammer by some organisations, and yet will likely be listed as a valid ‘ham’ source. This issue will very obviously cause skewed and inaccurate reporting.
Further issues in “subscription ham” is the diversity of source data, it cannot be very diverse because it’s very nature is that it is mailing list traffic, and mailing list traffic is not typical email, but a small subset. As an example you can prove this to yourself by thinking about how much of your email comes from mailing lists and opt-out email sources, and how much comes from your work, your partner, your family and your friends. My mailbox is not atypical and consists of 70-80% of mailing list mail. My wife’s email box is more typical, she has less than 1% mailing list messages. Friends and colleagues of mine are more the average IT user, and have between 10% and 20% of their mail from mailing lists. Note: All percentages given are after spam removal.
The solution to this problem is quite a simple one in theory, and yet could prove to be more difficult than it appears, this site is my attempt at fixing the problem, and my attempt at providing some real and unbiased stats.
Thanks for listening,
Matthew
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