Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2004 15:48:38 -0300 (ADT)
From: Chebucto Community Net 
To: Chebucto Community Net
Subject: Chebucto letter to our users


Dear Chebucto user:

We've been receiving many comments about spam filtering for Chebucto mail
accounts. To answer the most commonly asked question, yes we are still
filtering viruses and tagging spam. Spam, for those who aren't sure, is
unsolicited commercial email.

The Chebucto Community Net has been deluged with large amounts of incoming
spam recently. This increase is not confined to just Chebucto and is
common across the entire internet. We have two new Pentium 4 servers
working night and day doing nothing but processing incoming email and the
Chebucto Technical Committee is actively working on solutions to this
growing problem.

According to this year's Technical Committee Report, here is the current
composition of incoming Chebucto mail:

 5% - Real Mail
60% - Spam
20% - Bad Spam -- (Extreme high score spam that is dropped from the queue)
10% - Virus
 5% - Undetected Spam

The composition of your email may vary from this: some users receive more
spam and/or different spam than others.

Mail volumes have gone from about 40,000 emails a day to upwards of
100,000 to 140,000 messages a day on a typical day now.

Spammers craft their messages to pass spam filtering software. This is
now an ongoing battle between Internet Service Providers such as Chebucto
who are being forced to devote more time and energy to trying to keep the
mail system running under the incredible loads and the spammers, who are
flooding mail systems world-wide using an ever-changing variety of
techniques. As a result, for the forseeable future you will see spam
volumes go up and down as new filters are set up and spammers find new
ways around them. We put up new defenses, the spammers find new ways
around them.

There is no one solution to the problem. Many different alternatives are
being investigated and tested. We know that nobody likes to find their
mailbox full of spam and we ask your patience while we work on solutions.

Spammers and virus writers routinely use the email addresses of their
victims as the From: address on their emails to get around filters.  If
you start getting bounced messages for mail you did not send, this is
probably what has happened. This does not mean that your email account has
been compromised. Unfortunately there is nothing to be done about this
kind of email forgery except to wait for it to pass; spammers must
frequently change the From: address in their spam to avoid the filters.

In the past year spammers have started using viruses to open access to
unsuspecting users' computers to use them to send out their spam for them.
Typically the user is completely unaware their computer is being used to
send out spam. In the past year there have been three Chebucto users whose
computers were taken over this way. Fortunately it is possible for users
to prevent this sort of attack from working.

Our standard advice is for users to protect themselves with valid updated
antivirus software and be sure that if you are running any version of
Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer, or Outlook Express, that these have
all the latest patches from Microsoft applied. New virus software updates
and Microsoft Windows updates are released frequently.  These updates are
essential to help protect your computer from being used without your
permission by spammers and virus writers.

Microsoft updates can be found at:

        http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com

NEVER reply to a spam message, not even if it says you will be removed
from their lists. Never buy a spam-advertised product. Just delete the
spam unread.

Spammers are thieves and liars. Do not believe or trust a single thing
they may say in any of their messages. Spammers are con artists: if an
email offer sounds too good to be true, it is. There is no one who is
going to email a complete stranger and offer them millions of dollars to
help with a shady banking transaction. There are no miracle drugs or
potions that will enhance your body or stop aging. There are no lotteries
that award prizes to people over email. If you get what looks like an
email from your bank or eBay or PayPal wanting you to log in and verify
your account, password or PIN number, then pick up a phone book and look
up their number and call them to confirm it. Do not believe any
information in the email itself - the scam artists put in fake contact
information and fake phone numbers that go straight to them.

Spammers get their victim's addresses a number of ways but three ways in
particular are very common and can be avoided. Never put your address on a
web page - spammers read webpages looking for the '@' sign - and never
post to UseNet newsgroups without disguising your address somehow. Be
cautious what web page forms you put your address on. Most people use
"disposable" email accounts such as HotMail or Yahoo Mail when filling in
a website form.

Chebucto users can set or update their spam filtering preferences
at:

        http://nospam.chebucto.ns.ca

Chebucto mail forwarded to other accounts will not have spam filtered out.
Details can be found on the spam filtering preferences page.

Chebucto mailing list owners can set filters for their mailing lists using
the Majorcool mailing list administration tools at:

http://majorcool.chebucto.net

We want to thank everyone for their concern and for their patience. We are
working on this problem and we will post any new developments to the
Chebucto News page:

        http://chebucto.ca/news