A network of ISP administrators trying to fend off known sources of spam fingered RealNetworks again Friday as a problematic source of unsolicited email.
"We have just added them back to the RBL [Realtime Blackhole List]," said Nick Nicholas, executive director of the Mail Abuse Prevention System. "That means there's no question in our mind as to whether or not they're real spammers -- they are."
MAPS runs the Realtime Blackhole List, an email blacklist service. The service lets system administrators easily block incoming email from addresses and domains known to be problematic sources of unsolicited email.
Anti-spam groups and network administrators charged earlier this spring that too large a portion of RealNetworks' massive email campaigns promoting products and updates are sent to faked email addresses, which are then either forwarded by mail servers to dead ends, wasting bandwidth, or to accounts belonging to other people.
Many Web sites verify email addresses during site and software download registrations. To do so, they send a confirmation request to the email address given by the user. If the user receives it -- as legitimate users would -- they then reply with a blank message or confirmation number to prove the address is valid.
Anti-spam activists consider it "spam by negligence" not to use this technique and want RealNetworks to clean up its 60-million-address database.
But the company, which has been on the list several times, held firm to its position that the problem is not widespread and that the company can't be held responsible because its registrants fake email addresses.
"Our philosophy stays the same of giving people every opportunity at the time of downloading an acknowledgement ... of saying, 'I don't wish to receive email,'" said Steve Hayworth, RealNetworks' vice president of communications.
As a result, RealNetworks' email goes out to accounts of people that didn't solicit the messages. For example, registrants may at random fill in "bob@erols.com" during their registration, and without validation that account will receive future RealNetworks emails.
Critics charge the database could contain hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of phony addresses, though RealNetworks says its list has at most a small number of faked addresses, an unavoidable characteristic of a list of its size.
RealNetworks also noted that internal tests of email confirmation show users don't respond often enough to confirmation requests. The company says it doesn't want to risk eliminating people from the list who actually want to receive product news.
"It [is] just, we think, an inappropriate way to respond to people who unethically use fake email addresses to register RealPlayer," said Hayworth. "The root of the problem is people who use fake email addresses."
