Actually Art, we've received several different versions of the issue from a variety of Earthlink staff, mostly the technical support people. This is just one of the versions. I know this because I've personally talked to their technical people several times over the past couple of weeks.
 
I was able to finally talk to a live human being late yesterday afternoon who seemed very willing to discuss the issue and work together to solve the problem. He happens to be a Radio Amateur in the office of the CEO of Earthlink. I had written the CEO about the problem. His version, and the one he's working with us to resolve, has apparently little to do with spam, per se. He claims, after reviewing their internal procedures, that there is a high percentage of e-mail coming into Earthlink from arrl.net that contains either non-existent or closed account addresses. On the surface, this would indicate that a spammer is at work just e-mailing to any combination of letters/numbers (called a "dictionary attack") hoping to hit some real addresses at Earthlink.
 
The Earthlink process for "null routing" (basically sending all mail from an offending domain into the bit bucket) is completely automated, untouched by human hands. If the volume of mail to closed accounts as a percentage of the total of all the mail, gets above a certain limit, their process of delaying mail (null routing) kicks in.
 
What may be happening here is that a percentage of our members have switched their home e-mail addresses but failed to tell us. While most are active Radio Amateurs and it doesn't seem likely, this is the reason I'm being given at this point. If you are a conspiracy theorist (which I am not), you might believe that a spammer is "spoofing" the arrl.net domain in the "from" address of the messages to Earthlink and, at the same time, using a dictionary attack which would create the same situation. Either way, our new Earthlink contact is willing to work with us to try and resolve the problem. We will be trying to match our address list with their valid accounts and will purge any arrl.net account that is being forwarded to a closed or nonexistent Earthlink account. If what we are being told is true, this should resolve the problem.
 
Certainly no one likes to get spam. Although, I am a believer in economics and think that, if no one was making money off this junk, no one would be doing it. But I digress. The real culprits are not Earthlink or arrl.net but the ISPs all over the world that allow their sites to be used as entry points for this junk. That's why blackhole lists exist although they are problematic as well. But the perception is that whoever's domain is in the address is responsible for getting rid of the spam. It doesn't matter that the individual has posted his or her e-mail address all over the Internet for anyone to send things to, valid mail or junk. The perception is that its not the individual's problem. No one wants to hear that.
 
Of course, arrl.net could install spam filtering (at a cost which, to this point, has been deemed too expensive). Earthlink spends hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on it, probably in the millions. As Jay pointed out in a recent note, there is a small sub committee of A&F looking at this right now and will be making a recommendation. The bottom line is that it will probably cost money and we will have to make the decision if this is important enough to have resources applied to it, particularly in light of our recent strategic planning session that identified new strategies that will also require resources. It may be that we have to charge the members for it. That remains to be seen.
 
If I can provide any more information, please let me know.
 
73,
Barry, N1VXY
 
 -----Original Message-----
From: Sumner, Dave, K1ZZ
Sent: Monday, September 29, 2003 8:34 PM
To: arrl-odv
Subject: [ARRL-ODV:9537] Re: Earthlink

Well, this is a different story than the one Barry was told this afternoon by an assistant to the Earthlink President.
 
Dave
 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Goddard, Art (Dir, SW)
Sent: Tue 9/30/2003 12:04 AM
To: arrl-odv
Cc:
Subject: [ARRL-ODV:9535] Earthlink

Here is the reply of an Earthlink Network Abuse Engineer to one of our
Members (k6rix@arrl.net)
In the e-mail, the engineer says the mail our Member received from ARRL
contains misrepresentations and false assertions.  But the ARRL Member can
rely on Earthlink to get the truth.

Neat, huh?

73, Art  W6XD

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----


>Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2003 13:39:32 -0400 (EDT)
>From: abuse@abuse.earthlink.net
>To: k6rix@arrl.net
>Subject: Issue 030924-23958246
>
>We apologize for the confusion caused by the mail you may have
>received from arrl.net.  In this mail they have made several
>misrepresentations, such as the statement that EarthLink is
>blocking all mail from arrl.net.  This is not the case.  Neither
>is their assertion that this department claimed they were an open
>relay.
>
>In truth, arrl.net's servers have periodically triggered
>automated "self-defense" mechanisms on our mail servers.  These
>temporary blocks are triggered not simply by high volumes of
>unsolicited e-mail, but disproportionately high ratios of spam to
>legitimate mail.
>
>In the case of arrl.net, this is due to the fact that the
>administrators of arrl.net have chosen to take a completely hands
>off position in the fight against spam, doing nothing to prevent
>the unsolicited e-mail that is originally addressed to users in
>that domain from being propagated throughout the rest of the
>Internet.
>
>While the EarthLink Abuse department does not maintain this
>particular process and has no control over it, we have explained,
>in great depth and detail, the cause of the problem and what
>steps can be taken to prevent these blocks in the future.
>
>In summary, the ability to prevent these temporary blocks from
>being triggered lies completely within the control of arrl.net.
>Further questions about how they choose to run their services and
>the resulting issues should be referred directly to
><bshelley@arrl.org> and/or <bgmiller@nframe.com>, who make the
>decisions about the administration of arrl.net's servers.
>
>Regards,
>
>Louis Rush
>EarthLink Network Abuse Engineer
>abuse@abuse.earthlink.net
>http://www.earthlink.net/about/policies/
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
---
>