Privacy and Spam Policy
Privacy Policy | Spam Policy
MirandaNet's editor pursues as rigidly as possible a policy of disguising email address on the site so that they can't be harvested by 'spam bots', nasty versions of web crawlers which search web pages for valid email addresses. Why should anyone want to do this, you might ask? There are two reasons, as far as I know:
- Finding valid email addresses to send spam to
- Finding valid email addresses to use when sending spam
Each reason is equally obnoxious and objectionable. If you are unlucky enough to have found your email address on a spammer's list, you will know that spam can be at the very least a minor irritant, at worst, when it develops into a torrent of nasty mail, a reason for not using email. That is why I try my hardest to make sure that if your email address is on this site, it can't be read by a harvester. You can test this by typing your email address into Google or another search engine, and see if any reference to it appears with reference to a MirandaNet page. If it does, please with the details and I will put it right.
Why you might have been 'spammed' by MirandaNet
The second reason is possibly more disturbing. Recently I have received numerous 'Delivery Failure' emails purporting to refer to messages that I have sent which cannot be delivered for a number of reasons - 'mail box full' is one common reason, but 'no such address' is by far the commonest. One recent batch had about 100 randomly generated AOL email addresses that I had apparently been trying to contact. Goodness knows how many more actually got through, and I shudder to think what these people made of the messages that your humble and honest Editor was apparently sending them.
What these people are doing is doubly illegal and immoral: improper use of someone else's email address, and sending unsolicited email, but it seems there is nothing that one can do about this. Certainly one should never respond to spam, as this only confirms that the email address is real and it will no doubt get used with greater frequency. I can only apologise to anyone who has received a message purporting to come from me or from other MirandaNet addresses, or indeed any other domain names that I am associated with.
What can you do?
There are two things you can do to check that you have not been spammed by MirandaNet:
One is to look at the 'Header' of the message. In Outlook and Outlook Express you right click on the item before you open it and choose Options, or if you have already opened the item you can click on View then Options. The Header will have all sorts of information telling you where it came from, including the original sender. Unless this is Xilo, our ISP, it won't have come from us. Most of the recent batches have apparnetly been from an outfit in Italy or The Netherlands. I say 'apparently', because spammers prefer to fake just about everything in their messages.
Another is to look us up on a spam list. There are several of these around, but the one I use most is at www.dnsstuff.com where you can put our domain name (mirandanet.org.uk) into a spam database and check for yourself. You need to interpret the results with care, as not every listing indicates spamming. Sometimes you will see a highlight because of server error, or missing 'reverse DNS', none of which means spam.
We did once appear genuinely though incorrectly on one of these lists and some people did have their MirandaLink mail blocked. That was when our ISP was using a different Virtual Server, and someone else on the same server had what is called an 'Open Relay' which is capable of sending mail from a different server. Needless to say, MirandaNet has no such Open Relay. Web Editors who are interested in this topic will understand when I say we don't have Matt's Formmail on the site either (read all about it, but please don't use - get the better version from nms, which even Matt recommends on his own site), although would-be spammers try to find it on an almost daily basis. Many sites will tell you about the vulnerability of Matt's Formmail: follow this link for a typical one; and follow this link for an article telling you how to block attacks.
On a recent check of the DNS Stuff spam list I found that one private lister has our URL listed because we have no listed 'abuse' email address. While this is strictly true, all the .ac.uk addresses have a generic abuse address: abuse at ja.net.
Please contact us if you have any questions about this policy and other matters to do with spam or privacy on the web.
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