Local Loop

This morning I read this article on MyBroadband about the ISPA “hall of shame” list of South African spammers, and conducted a quick (somewhat non-scientific) investigation to see where the mail servers for the domains provided on the ISPA list are hosted.

After filtering out domains without MX records, MX records without valid A records, and IP addresses for which whois lookups failed, the 63 listed domains whittled down to 44 servers, of which 14 are hosted by ISPA members.

So Localloop.co.za hereby presents the ISPA member hall of shame:

1. Hetzner (4 servers, 2 of which are hosted in Germany)¹
2. Webafrica (4 servers, 3 of which are hosted in the US)
3. Internet Solutions: (2 servers)²
4. Datapro (2 servers)
5. RSAWeb (1 server)³
6. AboutIT (1 server)

The only non-ISPA member is Intekom (Telkom SA) with one spammer mail server.

This does not prove the spammers listed use these mail servers for sending spam (they could use any other ISP for that, and judging by recent complaints on the IOZ list, Vodacom SA is one of the favorite providers for spammers).

Having said that, wouldn’t you expect ISPA members to uphold the spirit of the anti-spam clause in the ISPA code of conduct by not hosting mail servers for the ISPA’s own list of spammer domains?

1. Tie with Webafrica, but I put them first because one of WA’s spammer mail servers is hosted by Hertzner. [↩]
2. Tie with Datapro, but I put them first because AboutIT’s spammer mail server is hosted by IS. [↩]
3. Tie with AboutIT, but I put them first because they have their own data center. [↩]