Federal and state law enforcement agencies pledged to take an aggressive new approach to fighting spam: identifying "open relay" mail servers that serve as conduits for massive quantities of junk e-mail.
At an event in Dallas on Thursday, representatives of the agencies said they--in tandem with officials from Australia, Canada and Japan--had sent letters to operators of over 1,000 e-mail servers around the globe warning that an open relay "creates problems for consumers worldwide, for law enforcement and for your organization."
"Spammers hunt these open relays down and hijack their resources," said Marc Groman, a staff attorney at the Federal Trade Commission, which has created a Web site devoted to open relays. "They avoid filters. They avoid law enforcers. They also damage the reputation of innocent parties. Therefore we want the open relays around the world closed."
