|Mail abuse home | Receiving spam | E-mail blocked (in or out) | |Spam from our customers | Our filtering methods | Acceptable use policy| BrightNet Oklahoma fights Internet abuse on many levels. Currently, the most prevelant abuse is unsolictied email; informally known as "spam". We, at BrightNet Oklahoma, collaberate with the anti-spam community to help fight the barrage of unsolicited emails. There are many perspectives on what spam is, those who send it, how it should be filtered, and how to communicate with others. This website will explain what our policy is and what you can do to help. What BrightNet Oklahoma considers to be spam: BrightNet Oklahoma considers spam to be any bulk email which is sent to a customer who has not requested the email. The term "bulk email" tends to be variable and is usually guaged by complaints. While our definition of spam is relatively strait forward, we are lenient about what we actually filter. Mistakes in mailing list management or by popular corporations are often forgiven and not rejected. The goal is to provide good service to our customers and not to punish bulk mailers. Our email policies apply equally to customer and non-customer alike. Users of the BrightNet Oklahoma network are strongly encouraged to maintain Closed-Loop Opt-In mailing lists. Complaints from other networks concerning email leaving our network are handled promptly. Customers who cannot maintain a clean mailing list are required to use the Closed-Loop Opt-In method. The fight against spam: E-mail was designed to be as fault tolerant as possible. There are many things that occur for an email to get from the sender to the recipient. The guidelines for writing E-mail software followed the premise of, "Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you accept." The goal was to ensure that different servers were compatible with one another and that an E-mail would always make it to the recipient or be returned to the sender with a reason why it couldn't be delivered. As the system has become abused by spammers and viruses (another type of spam), servers have had to become less liberal in what they can accept.Since E-mail servers are more strict concerning how they communicate, it is often necessary for the Administrators to communicate with each other reguarding their policies. BrightNet Oklahoma communicates with many different service providers and mail server administrators. Every effort is taken to try and ensure that our email is accepted by others and that their email is accepted by us. We often assist server administrators in having their servers removed from public blacklists or fixing configuration issues which break communication between their server and ours. We contribute ideas towards new methods of detecting and stopping spam, as well as hosting an authoritative nameserver for the CBL public blacklist.