Have you been Black Holed?
By Rochelle Jourdan ©
12 February, 1998

I have been twice, and it's not pleasant. To be "black holed" is what "they" call it when your domain name is reported as having sent "SPAM" (unsolicited email). This is a very poor excuse of a fix to halt spam. It will never work and I wish this new practice would stop and desist from the Internet, at once.

In my case, I was sending a friend email from my netcom address but it continued to bounce back to me, telling me she didn't exist! After a very close examination of the bounced post, I did find a URL that told me my domain name, (or shall I say the "numeric network address" which is a part of the domain name) was on a Black hole list. This not only affected her and my messages but everybody from her part of affected domain name and mine, combined. This is much more infectious than any STD and a lame excuse to try to curb spam.

All it takes is one person on any domain name to report to MAPS and 2 entire numeric network addresses (with at least 10's of thousands of customers) are blocked from normal email traffic. They are under the guise that they will stop the spammer. MAPS does tell you how to spend more time, (that we all have such an abundance of) to complain about spam to our ISP's deaf ear and when all else fails, anybody can report as indicated above. Until there is a sure fire way to rid of spam without affecting thousands of people who have nothing to do with the spam you receive, hit your delete key or forward the offensive mail to the domain from which it came, (determined by reading the headers), instead of preventing thousands of people from sending legitimate No-spam email.

Editors note: This article was revised March 8, 1998 after correspondence with 2 men from MAPS. I still hold my opinion of my article but elaborated a bit more about the numeric network addresses, as they pointed out.

Outside links related to Spam.

CAUCE, The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email
This site is designed to provide information about the problems of junk email, some proposed solutions, and to provide resources for the Net Community to make informed choices about the issues surrounding junk e-mail."

Fight Spam on the Internet

Get the Spammer!

A tool for tracking down junk e-mailers, junk news posters
and their internet service providers.

MAPS: The Realtime Blackhole List

Read some of Rochelle's other articles and poetry: