What is TOASTEDspam.com?

• This website is an archive of unsolicited commercial email received at email addresses belonging to our staff. Along with each email archived here we also try to include various contact information for the people who sent the email. We include lists of email addresses, names, physical addresses, phone numbers, and cross reference information whenever possible.

REMOVE ME FROM YOUR LIST NOW!

• Well, technically this isn't a question, but it is probably the single most common request we receive. Usually this request includes large amounts of profanity and comes from someone who has received a spam that is archived here on this site. We try to patiently address these requests, but the bottom line is that WE DO NOT send out the emails you see listed herein. We merely catalog and archive them. We are not the spammers nor do we have any influence over them in any capacity. We do not maintain their mailling lists nor can we arrange any removals from their lists. We're merely recipients of all the spam ... just as you are.

  If you found a sample of the spam you received on this website, all that means is that we have received the same spam too. We cannot remove you from our list because we don't even have a list! We certainly did NOT send the spam to you.

If you're not the spammer, then why is there a 'remove' link on your site?

• This is for removing a listing that does appear on the TOASTEDspam.com website. Occasionally a spammer will reform, stop spamming, and begin making a beneficial contribution to the world at large. They may wish to dissociate themselves with their previous spamming history. In this case, with proper proof, we're more than happy to remove their listings from this site and encourage them to succeed in their new venture. There are also cases in which a spammer has abandoned an old domain name and someone else has registered it. The new owner most likely won't want to be associated with the spamming activity of the previous owner. We're happy to remove those listings too. Lasty, we are as fallible as the next person. We may have made a mistake in gathering the evidence for a listing, or we may have gathered false information. Obviously we would want to remove these listings and appreciate being informed when a mistake is found. Thank you.

How do I get removed from spammers' lists?

• We wish we knew. Really we do. If we knew the answer to this question then this site wouldn't even exist.

Who gave you the authority to post all this confidential information?

• What confidential information? There is no confidential information anywhere on this website. The complete contents of any unsolicited email become public domain as soon as they are sent without prior permission to multiple recipients. Disclaimers to the contrary contained within the email are null and void. Any contact information listed after the email body is gathered from public whois records or from the spammers' own websites. This also includes any images displayed with the emails. If you want your information and images to remain confidential, then you'd darned well better not send them to us!

  As far as who gave us authority? No one did, nor was any authority necessary. We just archive and post what we get. This is a personal website maintained by our staff.

Do you post all the spam you receive?

• No, not even close, barely even a tiny smidgen. We simply don't have the time or resources for that undertaking. We receive 100 to 300 spams per day in our inboxes and usually post around 3 to 10 of these. For that matter, our mail server blocks an average of 500 to 1000 emails every day before they ever hit our spam filters. There are more inclusive archives on the 'net; we instead catalog a few spams with more information about the spammers.

  How do we decide which spams to post? Often we'll choose spams for which we can more readily dig up contact information rather than posting a lot spams sent from an faked hotmail.com address linking to a chinanet IP address. We'll also follow trends of large amounts of spam from the same organization, or from those spammers who have greatly annoyed us in some way. Hey, this is just our hobby, after all.

What spam filters do you use?

• We use several stages of filtering. Our front line is our own inhouse deny list, which we do make publicly available. This list is a collection of IP addresses, domains, hosts, and email addresses from which we have received spam and expect that it was not a one-time event. This list does tend to be more or less permanent; once an entry is made chances are it will stay there forever. There is no formal review process for this list since we usually come to the conclusion that we don't ever expect to receive good email from a particular source before adding that source to the list. In addition, our mail server is automatically configured to reject all messages from unresolveable domains. This step generally bounces 100 to 300 emails daily.

  Secondly, we make use of three realtime blackhole lists. We use Spamhaus.org's SBL and XBL as well as the open relay list from ordb.org. These blackhole lists bounce 300 to 700 emails every day.

  Finally, we use custom in-house developed software to scan every email with a bayesian filter and sort the incoming mail to our inboxes or spam folders. This filter is currently running at 98% accuracy and the end result seems to be about 20 to 50 spams per day in each staff member's spam folder.

Is your spam filtering software available for others to use?

• No, not currently. It is still in a very early and rough stage of development and requires too much manual tweaking from day to day. We haven't developed an installation program for it yet either. When we do get a stable release finished we will make it available to the public, however, it is a server level filter which means that it is only usable by ISPs and organizations running their own email server.

Why did you create this website? Why do you continue to maintain it?

• At the time we started this website there wasn't an enormous amount of public awareness or understanding of the spam problem. We thought that a public archive would be useful for convincing skeptics that the problem really does exist. By including contact information for the spammers we also hope that those recipients who may not know how to find this information for themselves may be able to communicate with the spammers if they wish to. Communication is a two-way process and no person or organization which initiates email communication should hide themselves from the recipients. Sending an email, whether solicited or not, should allow the recipient to respond. If we can help facilitate this in any way then our effort did not go to waste.

How do we contact you?

• Well, to be honest, we'd rather you didn't. We normally have more than plenty of things to occupy ourselves with all day and we don't really have time to deal with feedback on this website (it is just a hobby after all, and not part of our business). We do accept removal requests through the Remove link, though we probably won't respond to you even if we do act upon your request. You may also register for our forum which we do read now and then. We won't guarantee that we'll respond to you there either.

  Please don't even bother trying to send us email. The only communcation we're interested in is valid remove requests. Any email we receive will automatically end up in our spam folders where it will probably be ignored or trashed, or might even end up as a listing on the site.

Isn't bulk commercial email legal in the USA now as long as the spammers follow the new law?

• Possibly, although we've seen very few emails that actually comply with the law. However, in any case, it's still spam. Even if it is legal, then it's legal spam and we still don't want it in our inboxes.

What are the numbers in parentheses?

• These numbers are counters of how many times each individual article or listing has been viewed.

What is that scary network testing services page all about?

• This is a spamtrap with a bite! This is our method of discouraging spammers from harvesting email addresses from web pages. Any humans who visit that page and read it should very clearly realize that it would be a Bad Thing to send an email to the address listed on that page, and therefore would not do so. The address harvesting robots used by spammers won't be intelligent enough to read the page; they will simply add the address to the spammers' mailling list. However, the fact that the spammer didn't personally read the contract on that page does not absolve them of the responsibility for their actions. The spammers neatly trap themselves into the contract by their own nefarious activity.

  TOASTEDspam.com's staff will never involve itself in the actual network testing procedures outlined on that page. However, anyone who wants some practice testing spammers' networks may freely make use of the list of 'clients'. After all, these clients have requested the service, even if they don't realize it.