Anti-Spam Measures

We're doing many things at Hawaii Online to stop spam from getting into your aloha.net mailbox. For one, we've created a set of junk filters, ranging from simple and open to as precise and strict as you want, that you can tailor to your own email habits. You can set them up by logging into Web Mail.

Often, though, the flood of spam that's flowing across the Internet gets so bad that we need to stop it before it even gets onto our servers. If we didn't do anything more, your legitimate mail would easily get lost among all the trash, completely overwhelmed by the mass of junk mail that's beating on our doors to get into your mailboxes. So we take certain measures that stop well-known spam-friendly Internet providers from connecting to us, to keep them from ever getting the chance to sneak junk mail into your inbox. These are the "System-Wide Filters" that you may have read about when choosing your own filters with webmail's "Custom" option.

All of these measures are in place to make sure that the good mail gets through and the bad mail doesn't. But it's incredibly difficult to be 100% accurate. Sometimes legitimate email gets blocked, and all too often bogus email gets through. If you believe your own mail or email from some of your contacts at other ISPs is incorrectly being blocked, contact support@aloha.net. We'll work with you to get the problem resolved right away.

If you want to check whether a mail server is listed in any of these filters, you can use smtpcheck to see whether a domain, host, or IP address will pass all of our system antispam measures.

DNS Restrictions

When you're an ISP, part of being a good Internet citizen is saying where you're coming from, which you do by registering your IP address in the Domain Name System, or DNS. It's a little like having your ID with you when you go to buy something -- it just reassures people that you are who you say you are, and helps a little to prevent fraud. In the same way, hostnames and IP addresses go together (DNS) to make communication on the Internet a little more "legit". Unfortunately, there are a lot of ISPs that never bother to register DNS for their servers. This is very common behavior among those that are friendly to spammers. So we don't let a host send mail to our servers if it isn't registered. That is, in technical terms, when there's no PTR record for the host's IP address. We're not the only ones that do this -- it's a common way to make sure your servers only talk with others who are on the "up and up" -- and registering your hosts is recommended behavior in RFC 1912, Section 2.1. We occasionally make exceptions to the rules, though, and will work with admins to help them fix these problems. We don't want to stop the legitimate mail from getting through!

E-Mail Black Lists

Another way we stop misbehaving ISPs at the door is with "email black lists". Organizations on the Internet keep track of network providers who act as poor Internet citizens in various ways: perhaps they let any anonymous computer send mail through their systems (i.e. an "open email proxy"), perhaps they have a bad habit of letting spammers send mail from their servers, or perhaps they've been caught sending mail to "honey pot" addresses that are only used to catch junk mail. The Internet is a very complicated place, and behaving well on the 'net can be a tough job, so there are a lot of reasons a provider might end up on one of these lists. But at the end of the day, it comes down to whether the people they give network access to are playing nice with others. If they're not, and they don't show any signs of stopping, they end up on one of these blacklists, and then we have to stop letting them talk to our users before their poor behavior ruins your experience.

The list of filters we use is subject to change at any time, but here's a list of some of the providers we may choose from:

sbl.spamhaus.org @ The Spamhaus Project

sbl.spamhaus.org is The Spamhaus Block List, "a database of IP addresses of direct spam sources: spammers, spam gangs and spam support services (but not open proxies or open relays)."
See http://spamhaus.org/.

list.dsbl.org @ DSBL - The Distributed Server Boycott List

list.dsbl.org is a list of hosts that have sent email to a special "Honey Pot" test address, listme@listme.dsbl.org.
See http://www.dnsrbl.net/.

spam.dnsrbl.net @ DNSRBL - The Domain Name System Real-time Black List

spam.dnsrbl.net is another list of hosts that have been identified as frequent spammers by sending email to "Honey Pot" addresses. These kinds of spammers grab email addresses from Usenet groups, bulleting boards, and unsubscription requests to other junk mail, then add these address to their spam lists.
See http://www.dnsrbl.net/.

dun.dnsrbl.net @ DNSRBL - The Domain Name System Real-time Black List

dun.dnsrbl.net is a list of dialup IP addresses that are known to send a lot of spam.
See http://www.dnsrbl.net/.

relays.ordb.org @ ORDB - The Open Relay Database

relays.ordb.org is another list of hosts that are open mail relays.
See http://www.ordb.org/.

relays.osirusoft.com - OsiruSoft's Open Relay Spam Stopper

relays.osirusoft.com is yet another open mail relay list, but it includes many smaller blacklists as well. It tends to include a lot of very questionable entries, though, so we stopped using it a long time ago and probably won't employ it again in the foreseeable future.
See http://relays.osirusoft.com/.

PLEASE NOTE: HOL does not maintain these lists. All questions regarding them can be found on their respective web sites or by contacting their maintainers.