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Why You Should Not Use SPEWS

Overview | How SPEWS Operates | Use SpamCop not SPEWS

Overview

This section is to educate network administrators why they should NOT use SPEWS as a mechanism to filter out incoming e-mail to their mail servers.  The first and foremost reason not to use SPEWS is that SPEWS has listed thousands of IP addresses from which spam has never originated.

Another reason is that your users will complain that they cannot receive e-mail from a legitimate source.  For example, lets say you are the network administrator for a small business and you use SPEWS to filter out incoming e-mail.  An employee at your company might not receive a legitimate business e-mail from a client if that client's IP address is listed in SPEWS and you use SPEWS as a filtering mechanism.  Furthermore, your client might be completely innocent of spamming.