Overview of Frequently Asked Questions

1.1. What exactly is a white list?

1.2. How can this white list benefit you?

1.3. How can you be on the white list?

1.4. How can you use the white list?

1.5. How do we keep track of complaints?

1.6. Why do we keep track of complaints?

1.7. Why are email standards different then other types of marketing?

1. General Overview

The Frequently Asked Questions should answer most of your questions of course if you have further questions please direct them to inquiry@stop-spam.org and we will try to answer them promptly.

1.1. What exactly is a white list?

A White List in this case, will be a list of IP addresses assigned to mail servers of those that follow the Internet's widely accepted Best Practices for Electronic Mail Marketing and in general Online Marketing.

This White List is generally used to supercede the various Black/Block List implemented by the Service Provider as per their level of comfort with this concept. Since most Service Providers are comfortable with this concept your Electronic Mail Marketing will get delivered.

1.2. How can this white list benefit you?

This White List will benefit the Service Provider of both the sender and the recipient by allowing the Service Provider to reduce or even eliminate false positives with their spam filters. The White List will benefit the sender by getting more if not all of the email sent to the intended recipient. This will benefit the end user, e.g. consumer in so the end user will receive less spam. A win, win solution for all.

1.3. How can you be on the white list?

Your IP's for your mail server will be listed if you conform to our standards for Best Practices for Email and Business online.

You will need to read these standards and then be sure you can agree to abide by them. After you have read the standards you will need to fill out an application and submit it to us. We will then investigate your business to see if you are in fact following our standards. If we find you are making a good faith effort and find something we have questions about we will ask.

If you are just a spammer trying to get your spam through other people's filters we recommend you don't try to use our White List to do so. The Carrot and the Stick is an appropriate name and we will follow through with whatever means are needed to protect our reputation and the mail servers entrusted to us for safekeeping.

1.4. How can you use the white list?

As an Service Provider you can either download the zone file daily or query the zone file as needed.

The HOW TO pages are being built.

1.5. How do we keep track of complaints?

We add an abuse address to each email sent as follows:
X-spam complaints to abuse@stop-spam.org

1.6. Why do we keep track of complaints?

We track all complaints to see there are no violations of our policies. Each and every complaint is investigated and if we find any individual and/or company intentionally violated our trust their IP ranges will be removed from the White List in real time.

Under certain circumstances, the following could happen.
Their IP ranges will be removed from our Accepted List.
Their IP ranges will get added to our Rejected List.
Last but not least, possible litigation.

1.7. Why are email standards different then other types of marketing?

Electronic mail differs from any other form of marketing in that a regular dialup account can be used to send millions of spam and the spammer would pay no more the the cost of any other individual user even though the spammer consumed one million times the bandwidth.

The spammer's expenses will then need to be paid and the Service provider has no choice but to pass this on to each and every user they have with higher prices.

With all other forms of advertising, you have the option of not receiving the advertisement.

With regular postal mail you can merely mark the junk mail as refused and place it back in your receptacle.

With Telephones, you can just not pick up the telephone, if you are willing to pay for caller ID.

With Television, you can simply turn the channel, mute the sound or heaven forbid turn the television off.

With Electronic Mail, you have none of these options. If you fail to download the junk email, it will still be there the next time you fetch your mail. If your family, friends, business acquaintances or anyone sends you an email, you must first download the spam before you can retrieve the legitimate email.

This is the very essence of, "Forced Advertising" and is wrong.