wHEN A 67 YEAR OLD GRANDMOTHER, WORKING ON A 50TH CLASS REUNION BOOK,
AND GETS
AN E-MAIL SHE ATTEMPTS TO SENT TO 3 COMMITTEE MEMBERS, AND GETS A
NOTIFICATION THAT IT IS SPAM -- WHERE CAN SHE GO -- WHO CAN SHE CALL
-- TO GET THIS RIDICULOUS MISTAKE TAKEN CARE OF??????????

---

Request for Question Clarification by larre-ga on 28 Aug 2003 19:49 PDT

We can help you get it taken care of... but first, we'll need to know

What organization accused you of spamming?

-and-

The message you received.  Please omit any individual's personal
details and email addresses, our Editors remove any questions that
disclose private information.

larre-ga

---

Clarification of Question by kay6543-ga on 28 Aug 2003 23:07 PDT

I am not sure I can answer all of this.  The E-Mail was from
postmaster@declude.hct.com, which is unattended.  The message was that
my mail was not delivered because it did not pass the OSRELAY anti
spam screening process.  I was told in order to be removed from
national anti-spam blacklist to forward it to my system administrator.
 (???) Also, for detailed information and removal instructions to
visit http://relays.os.irusoft.com  (No such page is in existence at
this time.  There were over two pages of numbers and codes.

I have no idea how our little message was ever branded as spam.  Do
you want the message I sent>

---

Request for Question Clarification by larre-ga on 29 Aug 2003 00:20 PDT

You've answered just fine. As probonopublico says, it's likely nothing
personal. htc.com is a business. Some businesses use very agressive
spam filters. It's possible to receive such a message if your ISP --
not you, other users -- is on a company blacklist.

Calling the recipients and requesting that they add you to their
receiver lists is also a good idea. You could also contact the company
webmaster and request removal from any list, if, indeed, your address
was actually added to one.

Just FYI, htc.com is:

Health Card Technologies, Inc.

1000 W. Wilshire, Suite 318
Oklahoma City, OK 73116
Phone: (405) 810-0138 
http://hct.com/pages/contact.htm

If you wish us to pursue this further on your behalf, just ask, and I,
or another researcher, will dig deeper.

---l

---

Clarification of Question by kay6543-ga on 29 Aug 2003 10:15 PDT

We don't seem to be on the same page here.  The three recipients are
friends of mine, and have been for over 50 years.  I am in all of
their address books, and they are not aware of this because the mail
was not sent to them, it was returned.
I am definitely on a blacklist, but can't tell which one.  Mainly, I
can't tell why, which is what I really want to know because I am an
author of short stories and novels, and use e-mail constantly to
publishers and agents.  I could forward the entire e-mail and you
could block out the names if that would help.  Please let me know.  I
have to get this taken care of. You have given me maby it is this and
maybe it is that.  If there is no way of getting me off this list,
please advise me.  Thank you.

---

Request for Question Clarification by chellphill-ga on 02 Sep 2003 06:49 PDT

Hi kay6543-ga,
     Unfortunately  http://relays.osirusoft.com/ is down indefinetly.
"Due to the severe drain of resources, relays.osirusoft.com will be
down
for an undetermined period of time. Please ask all sites using data
from relays.osirusoft.com to stop until further notice"
     In order to resolve your situation, it would help to know where
you send your e-mail from, for example, do you use your ISP's
(internet service provider's) e-mail (such as AOL, or MSN) or do you
use another e-mail service other than your ISP's, such as hotmail, or
yahoo? Also, the e-mail you tried to send to the 3 committee members,
what e-mail service do they use? You don't have to tell me their
e-mail addresses, just tell me what the addresses end with, starting
with the @ symbol.
Thanks so much!
chellphill-ga

Hello kay6543-ga!
I understand it can be quite frustrating to be told you are on a
blacklist, when you know you have done nothing to deserve it! But rest
assured, the problem is their's, not yours. You have done nothing
wrong.
It appears that Osirusoft, a spam blacklist, is experiencing
"difficulties", to say the least.
Spam blocklists, which are databases that contain the IP addresses of
suspected spam operations or computers that can be exploited to send
spam. Such lists are used by major corporations, ISPs, e-mail
providers, and government agencies to reduce the volume of spam (junk
mail) flowing into their networks. E-mail servers at a site check the
IP address of incoming messages and reject any that match one on the
list
Then you are informed of the steps you need to take in order to
rectify the situation. At that point you would normally forward that
e-mail to your ISP, or e-mail provider. Then your ISP/e-mail provider
should go through their system and find the errors on their end that
is causing it and fix them. Then they would request that the IP
address be retested again, and once it was found to be "in the clear",
the IP would be removed from the blacklist and you could go back to
sending e-mail without any problems. However, in this case it seems
that it probably isn't your ISP or e-mail provider with the problem.
Due to recent attacks against Osirusoft, the creator decided to shut
the service down, which resulted in incorrectly labeling innocent
e-mails as spam.

The ISP/e-mail provider of your intended recipients should have
already received a notification from Osirusoft's severs to stop using
the service. If they have not yet reconfigured their servers so that
they are able to receive your mail, I would recommend e-mailing the
postmaster of the ISP or e-mail service and refer them to any of the
links listed below. To reach them, you could try sending them an
e-mail addressing it as postmaster@ followed by the domain name that
appears at the end of your intended recipients e-mail address. For
example, if you were trying to send the e-mail to "joe@example.com",
then you would address the postmaster as "postmaster@example.com"...
You will probably be unable to reach the postmaster using your current
e-mail address, so I would recommend using an alternate e-mail address
or temporarily registering for a web based e-mail service such as
Hotmail http://login.passport.net/uilogin.srf?id=2 or  Yahoo
http://mail.yahoo.com/. You might also try going to the web address of
the e-mail service in question, such as "www.example.com"... and see
if you can either reach them via a web form that you can fill out, or
locating their number and contacting them by phone.


Here are some links with recent news on Osirusoft, and the situation
at hand:

When trying to go to http://relays.osirusoft.com/
(I received the following)
"Due to the severe drain of resources, relays.osirusoft.com will be
down
for an undetermined period of time. Please ask all sites using data
from relays.osirusoft.com to stop until further notice"
(Cached version of their main page:)
http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:b4oCpSfqIRAJ:osirusoft.com/+osirusoft&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

http://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/31856
Osirusoft MIA?
Spammers cripple popular blacklist

http://slashdot.org/articles/03/08/27/0214238.shtml?tid=111&tid=126
""As of today, Osirusoft, distributer of the SPEWS and open relay
blocklists, among others, is no longer operational. Servers using
these lists (including the FTC) are currently rejecting ALL email.
This shutdown seems to be in response to a several-week-long DDoS
attack on Osirusoft, SPEWS and others, resulting in both sites being
down."

"Earlier today our site mysteriously ended up on Joe Jared's Osirusoft
SPAM blacklist which is used by lots of antispam software (like
SpamAssassin and sendmail). Since he is currently under a serious DDoS
attack, there was no way to appeal this decision. We contacted Mr.
Jared by phone who informed us that 'everyone needs to stop using
Osirusoft and that he's going to be shutting the service down.' Then
he says he's going to blacklist 'the world' (aka, ban *.*.*.*) to get
his point across. Later on this evening, he apparently went ahead and
did just that. Succumbing to lawsuits and DDoS, a once great blacklist
is dead. SpamAssassin is removing it from their config in the next
release (rc3) and email admins around the globe are reconfiguring
their mail servers."

http://www.e2ksecurity.com/archives/000450.html
"Osirusoft shut down SPEWS after being the target of an ongoing
distributed-denial-of-service (DDos) attack. The manner in which it
was shut down caused lots of bounces (including for my friend Bob
Thompson and Kent State University, among others). The problem is that
when Joe Jared, Osirusoft operator, shut down his service, he did so
by telling the server to blacklist every IP address. Sites that rely
solely on SPEWS thus dropped all their incoming mail on the floor."

http://www.altn.com/press/press_release.asp?ReleaseID=77
"Arlington, TX - August 28, 2003 - Recently the Osirusoft RBL site has
come under serious denial of service attack. In response to this
attack, the managers of that site have black listed many sites
incorrectly. This RBL site is no longer reliable, and if you are using
it in your MDaemon Spam Blocker, you could be refusing legitimate mail
or having it incorrectly marked as spam.

Please remove any Spam Blocker entry from your Spam Blocker
configuration that refers to Osirusoft. You can do this by opening the
Spam Blocker configuration GUI through the Setup->Security->Spam
Blocker menu selection or see our online KB article for more detail."
 
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11263
"Osirusoft, providers of shoe inlays(!) and spam blocking data to the
net were forced by massive illegal network data attacks to drop
distributing the spam tracking data. It's alleged that Joe Jared,
proprietor of Osirusoft, decided to 'go out with a bang'. At any rate,
his servers have started declaring all email in the entire net to be
spam."

http://www.mail-archive.com/declude.junkmail%40declude.com/msg10455.html
"Legit E-mail failing their tests and slowdowns in processing E-mail.
The word is that they are blacklisting the world...if you can reach
their servers."

http://www.msnbc.com/news/959094.asp?0cv=TB10&cp1=1
"On Tuesday morning, they awoke to discover that Jared reprogrammed
the database to “blacklist the world,” or return all queries as
positives, which apparently caused an untold number of e-mails to be
falsely blocked as spam"

If you have any questions about the information in which I have
provided, do feel free to request a clarification of my answer, and
please be sure to allow me enough time to respond to your
clarification request before rating the answer.
Thanks so much!
chellphill-ga

Search Terms used:
Osirusoft
Declude

I don't think that it was anything personal.

Some folks are so fed up with spam that they automatically reject any
mail from addresses that they don't already know.

I would suggest that you phone the three recipients in question and
request that they put you in their address books.

Then try again.

It is also possible that someone sent spam using your e-mail address. 
Some unethical spammers "borrow" the addresses of others so they can
sneak their garbage onto others' computers more easily.  It is also
possible that somebody who has your address had a computer that got
infected with one of the worms that sends out e-mail using any address
it can find, including those of innocent people.

There is also the distinct possibility that your particular message
was not branded as spam, but that your ISP is on a blacklist.

For example, if your email address is grandma@myisp.com, then
MyISP.com may be on a blacklist of open relays. This means that a
spammer can use their mail server to send spam, therefore all mail
coming from their mail server is rejected in order to force MyISP.com
to improve their security.

You may want to contact your ISP and complain that your mail is being
rejected. You may not be the only one.

- Hammer