IP in spam databases
We are sure most of you have heard, of, know about, or have experienced SPAM. Here is a small piece of text from Wikipedia, from which you will learn about the origin of the term.
The term SPAM first appeared in 1936 — this was the name of tinned ham made by Hormel Foods (pork shoulder and ham) (according to other sources, in 1937 Hormel Foods produced a product called Spiced Ham—starting with SP and ending with AM, hence SPAM). The tinned ham was tasty, nutritious and cheap, which was crucial at that time (it was a spicy sausage meat from second-grade pork). No wonder that soon enough SPAM practically became the national American food.
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The SPAM name stuck as a synonym of intrusive advertising thanks to a famous sketch from "Monty Python's Flying Circus" 1969 show by the comedian group Monty Python. The meaning of the sketch comes down to the fact that in a cafe all dishes on the menu contain SPAM, some of them even several times. When the wife of the main character asked to bring her a meal without SPAM, the waitress offered her a dish with a small amount of SPAM. The woman is outraged while the chorus of vikings seated at the next table starts to sing a song of praise to SPAM, after which the sketch descends into chaos. At the end of the sketch the woman exclaims: “I don't like spam!” The credits to the names of the actors also contain the word SPAM. In total, this word is referred to more than one hundred times during the sketch.
Spamming had been practiced as a prank by participants in multi-player dungeon games, to fill their rivals' accounts with unwanted electronic junk. The first known electronic chain letter, titled Make Money Fast, was released in 1988.The first major commercial spam incident started on March 5, 1994, when a married team of lawyers, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, began using bulk Usenet posting to advertise immigration law services. The incident was commonly termed the "Green Card spam", after the subject line of the postings. The advertising messages annoyed the users OS much they started comparing them to tinned ham.
This is how the word "spam" got its new meaning, which later got incorporated in computer terminology to refer to intrusive advertising messages.
So, we all know that spam is bad, because we get tons of unnecessary garbage to our inboxes, and sometimes, what's even worse, viruses, trojans and other malicious code. In order to protect users from all this there are databases that contain IP addresses of the most hard-core spammers. Various antispam filters of our email services and software use these databases to separate SPAM from the correspondence we need and expect. How does it work? Let's say, someone sends spam in mass numbers from a specific IP address. This IP is very likely to make it into one or a few databases. Then, after receiving a message to your mailbox the email service will check the IP address the letter was sent from for presence in one of such databases. If this IP is blacklisted in at least one of them, a letter is marked as spam and either not accepted or is moved to a special folder or deleted (it depends on the mail service). As a result, this letter does not reach the recipient.
Now you have an idea of how the whole system works. And now imagine that one day you receive an IP address that is blacklisted in one or several spam databases. What does this mean? Yyour letters may be regarded as spam by email services and will not be delivered to the recipient. Why you got this IP address is not as relevant, it could have been used for mass mailing in the past.
Our test will help you determine whether your IP address is present in any of several dozen most active SPAM databases. You will also be able to check any other IP you want.
If your IP is present in one of the databases, you will get a notice highlighted in red. By following a link in the notice you will be able to send an application to have your IP removed from this spam database.
By clicking the button below, you can run the test. Please note that this procedure may take some time, from several dozen seconds to several minutes. Please be patient.
