News.admin.net-abuse.email

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The correct title of this article is news.admin.net-abuse.email. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.

news.admin.net-abuse.email (sometimes abbreviated nanae or n.a.n-a.e, and often incorrectly spelled with a hyphen in "email") is a Usenet newsgroup devoted to discussion of the abuse of email systems. The newsgroup is or should be the one in which discussion of the spam problem and of how to end it would be made. In practice it tends to succumb to the forces that weaken all newsgroups. Among these are strong ego on the part of regular participants and a desire to argue rather than to discuss. This is compounded by the tendency of some to oppose any discussion that shows any weakness of a favorite technique. Nonetheless some useful discussions do occur and the newsgroup frequently is a good place to learn of actual significant events relating to spam, such as (for example) the arrest of a known spammer or the naming of a spammer as the defendant in a lawsuit. Steve Linford, the founder of Spamhaus, sometimes posts in the newsgroup.

1 Topics covered
2 History
3 NANAEisms
4 References
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Topics covered

In its original charter the following examples of "on-topic" areas were listed:

Mailbombing
DoS attacks
Listserv bombs
Unsolicited email
Email address list
Mailing list abuse
Large-scale mailings
Chain letters
Email viruses
Pyramid schemes
Filtering software

Eventually, by mutual consent, it was also determined that the following were also "on-topic":

Cats (on a superficial/anecdotal level)

In recent years the group has been subject to several attacks, most prominently denial-of-service attacks using hipcrime.

[edit] History

The group was officially proposed (i.e its RFD posted) by Tim Skirvin (tskirvin) on July 9, 1996 alongside a number of other groups in order to reduce the load on the two net abuse groups at that time, news.admin.net-abuse.announce and news.admin.net-abuse.misc.

Later that month it went to vote and passed 451 to 28.

In September 2002 it was proposed that a subgroup, news.admin.net-abuse.email.blocklists be created.

[edit] NANAEisms

Over time, some (more or less) NANAE-specific terms were coined^[1]:

404-compliant: A website that has been terminated by its hosting provider for terms of service violation is said to be "404-compliant", a reference to the 404 "not found" status code in HTTP.
Bulletproof
Cartooney
Cats and Coffee warning: A Cats and Coffee warning[1][2] or C&C warning is a satirical warning that a usenet posting or other writing may contain humorous material. The C&C warning originated with the usenet group news.admin.net-abuse.email, but has spread to other groups.[3] The warning is an admonition to the reader to secure liquid beverages (particularly hot ones) and cats in case uncontrollable laughter breaks out upon reading the article.
Chickenboner
Cut it out, Ron
Frea Speach: Spammers claim the right to distribute unsolicited bulk mail as part of their right to free speech under the United States' Constitution. After one such person repeatedly mis-spelled it as "free speach", newsgroup participants who argued that the right to free speech refers to the right to not be censored by the U.S. Government and nothing to do with the right to employ the services of private individuals and organizations to distribute bulk mail, took to referring to this claimed right as "frea speach", deliberately mis-spelling it partly as a parody and partly to distinguish it from actual free speech rights.^[2]
Joe job
LART
Listwashing
Mainsleaze
Pink contract: A contract for internet services or hosting that makes it difficult to impossible to terminate the contract for spamming.
Quirk Objection
Sock
Spamhaus
Spamware
TINW: There is no We
Whack-a-Mole: The act of repeatedly causing spammers' throwaway accounts and drop boxes to be terminated. Named after the Whac-A-Mole arcade game.^[1]