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July 17, 2007

The worldwide nature of the Internet and, by extension, any less-than-desirable activity is one of the major sticking points among antispam devotees. I can only shake my head when I receive a spam like the following from a company I'll rename here as SPAM_HOST:

We offer Bullet Proof dedicated servers & Antiabuse hosting for direct mailing, all types of adults, logs, fakes and other projects.

We have:
· 100 Mbit channel
· Guaranteed uninterrupted power supply
· Support service
· Anonymity
· Remote access to power supply (APC PDU)

Standard server configuration: Pentium 4 3.0G/DDR2 1024Mb/HDD 80Gb Sata2

Also, any configuration can be ordered.

After the server will be ordered setup is done within 24 hours.

All types of spam is allowed.

You can pay us by:
- webmoney
- E-gold
- paypal
- wire transfer

If you have any questions, please contact us:
icq: [number removed]
www: http://www.SPAM_HOST.com
tel: [Belarus telephone number removed]

Thank you for your time and attention!
Best regards, SPAM_HOST.

Here's an outfit bragging that its goal is to make money by being (supposedly) immune to antispam or antiabuse filtering. The message, as expected, was delivered through a bot-net.

I then looked at the domain registration information for the outfit. Although some fields were correct (admitting to be from Belarus, and offering the same phone number as in the spam), other fields, such as the street or mailing address, were devoid of information.

It is sometimes possible to wreak havoc with an ill-intentioned online company by challenging an incomplete or bogus domain registration with the registrar. Unfortunately, that is not an option in this case: The company is, itself, the domain registrar for its own domain.

Oy!