SPEWS

» see spews.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

SPEWS was a list of IP address ranges belonging to providers that hosted spammers, or that hosted the websites spam was advertising. Mail servers checked it over ordinary DNS during an incoming SMTP connection, so testing a sender against it cost one lookup and nothing else. That much was unremarkable. Several blocklists of the period worked the same way.

The listing policy is what set it apart. Where other lists named the specific address a spammer was using, SPEWS started there and widened outward into the surrounding block, on the theory that a provider ignoring an abuse complaint would stop ignoring it the moment its paying customers on neighboring addresses could no longer send mail. The collateral damage was the mechanism, not a side effect. There was no appeals process, because there was nobody to appeal to. The operators never identified themselves and were open about why: anonymity kept them out of court.

The copyright line on its own pages read 2000 to 2002, which is the only origin date SPEWS ever published about itself. The database took its last update on 24 August 2006 and nothing followed it. No notice and no explanation, since there was nobody in a position to give one without surrendering the anonymity the whole thing was built on.

~ the dossier ~

~ the wide block ~

In May 2005 SPEWS listed a long stretch of address space belonging to Telewest, the British cable operator, after customer machines inside it were hijacked to send spam. Roughly 900,000 Blueyonder subscribers sat in the listed range. Almost none of them had done anything, and that was precisely why they were listed. Nine hundred thousand people with a mail problem is leverage. One compromised PC is not.

So the list read completely differently depending on where you sat. If you administered a mail server, you had a switch that made your inbox quieter at somebody else's expense. If you were a home subscriber on a large consumer ISP, you had no switch at all, only mail that bounced with a URL in the rejection message pointing at a site run by people who would not talk to you.

I was a student for the whole span SPEWS was operating and never ran a mail server, so I was on the second side of that without knowing the list existed. The name carries weight only for people who did mail administration in the early 2000s. Everyone else saw the bounce message.

~ the people who sued ~

In 2002 an Australian bulk mailer named Wayne Mansfield sued the anti-spam campaigner Joey McNicol over a SPEWS listing of his company. It failed, because Mansfield could not show that McNicol had reported him. In April 2003 an outfit calling itself EMarketersAmerica.org sued a set of anti-spam organizations including SPEWS for restraint of trade, which observers read as an attempt to force disclosure of who the operators actually were. Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks dismissed it with prejudice that October.

The pressure that came closest to working was technical. Through the summer of 2003 the blocklists were hit with sustained denial-of-service traffic. Joe Jared, who served SPEWS data through his Osirusoft site, described floods reaching around a gigabyte per second and closed his service in late August 2003. SPEWS stayed reachable only because mirrors carried the data.

~ the last update ~

24 August 2006 is the day the database stopped changing. Servers configured to query it kept querying for a long time afterward, which is a hazard of its own, because a frozen blocklist goes on punishing address ranges years after whatever was wrong with them got fixed. The sites that tracked blocklists eventually marked SPEWS dead and told administrators to pull it out of their configurations.

In January 2007 something calling itself APEWS turned up, the Anonymous Postmaster Early Warning System, running the same wide-block policy under the same total anonymity. Whether any of the same people were behind it was never established. spews.org does not resolve today.

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