Antispam

From www.hserus.net

Current role and activities

I am currently on sabbatical from my job, working on a cybersecurity research and field work project on contract for the ITU. Since August 2001, I have been Messaging Systems Specialist, and then Manager of Antispam Operations at Outblaze, one of the largest email service providers in the world, providing email hosting and spam filtering services to several large ISPs, email providers and universities, with over 40 million users.

Besides managing spam filtering policies and acceptable use policy enforcement at Outblaze, I also found myself being frequently interviewed on spam stories by various media, including Businessweek, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, the International Herald Tribune, Salon, PC Magazine etc. A few of these stories are linked to from my résumé.

I've spoken at at various antispam conferences organized by ISPs (MAAWG, APRICOT) and public policy organizations (including ITU, OECD and APECTEL)

Early History

A few years ago, I was not an antispammer. Well yes, I hated spam, but I was just a student and a freelance web designer. I got into antispamming purely by accident, after the email address I used for my web design business started getting more and more spam, lots of it (and this was in the late 90s, when the "lots of spam" I used to get now is actually a quite light spam load by today's standards).

That made me start looking around for resources on spam and what I found was a high traffic mailing list - spam-l, and an even more high traffic usenet newsgroup, news.admin.net-abuse.email or nanae for short. Spam-L was great, and nanae was fun, as well as being eminently readable for the cute cat stories and pun cascades that most threads eventually turned into, with regular posters like Gym Quirk. Norman deForest (RIP), Clifto Sharp and others.

I also got together with some friends and started CAUCE India, the Indian chapter of CAUCE, the largest volunteer antispam organization in the world. CAUCE India is still around, but most of the work that goes on is at an asia pac level now, after I helped start APCAUCE in 2003. Anyway, after about a year of nanae and spam-l, I saw that Juno was looking for abuse desk people at its Hyderabad, India office - an American ISP that was running its customer support operations out of India long before CNN's Lou Dobbs and Tom Friedman heard about it, and before people stateside even heard of places like Bangalore and Hyderabad.

I joined them and had an interesting six months there before I decided to move on. Someone at Juno's abuse desk and customer support division had the interesting, and now all too common, idea that American users would prefer to be handled by people with American sounding names, so that we all had to use aliases matching our initials. I was "Scott Reid" there for a month or so before I quit, and while I was "Scott Reid", I rewrote several dozen standard boilerplate replies that were used by the Juno abuse desk. These replies were apparently still being used three or four years later, so that I got more than one reply from "Scott Reid, Juno Security & Abuse" whenever I had to email Juno's abuse desk :)

My next job - the last one before I joined Outblaze - was at BPL Innovision, the technology arm of a large Indian conglomerate that ran (emphasis on the past tense here) an ISP, a portal / freemail and a cellphone carrier, besides having lots of employees with email addresses. I helped setup and run antispam on, and did some sysadmining on BPL's corporate mail, the freemail and the cellular carrier (BPL Mobile)'s email to SMS gateway - which became a magnet for local spammers who quickly caught on to the delightful possibilities of sending an sms to every single cellphone user in a city by feeding a big list of cellphone-number@bplmobile.com type addresses into a bulk mailer program. I stayed there for about a year before Outblaze made me an offer I couldn't refuse.