Worldcom Inc’s UUNet Technologies Inc appears to have caved in to the anti-spamming group led by students at Radford University in Virginia for the company has now said it will introduce stronger anti-spamming technology to help prevent its Usenet newsgroups from being clogged with unsolicited advertising, or spam as it is known. The Fairfax, Virginia company, which claims to be the world’s largest internet service provider (ISP) appears to place the blame at the door of its resellers, claiming that more than 99% of the spamming investigations conducted by UUNet involve a reseller. UUNet said it is up to each reseller to post its own warnings to customers, and cut them off if necessary. UUNet is adding technology which its says will identify the source of a spam; filtering news postings from sources that cannot be authenticated and discontinuing the relay of third-party mail messages to non-UUNet destinations. That last part refers to the practice of using an SMTP server other than your own to relay a message and using a fake e-mail address. The message will appear to be from that SMTP server and have no trace of where it originated. As a temporary measure UUNet is blocking all news postings from the dynamic address allocation pool, which is the set of IP address it dynamically allocates to those users that dial in. When they dial in they are assigned a temporary IP number, which ‘dies’ when they log off and next time they will get a different one. Corporate computers on a network each have a permanent IP address and are not affected. When the company has implemented its user authentication technology it will lift the block. The company has notified its customers and promises to keep them advised of further changes.
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