Get Wired News delivered to your inbox or hand-held device. Why U.S. Failed in Virus Alerts 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. 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. As a result, RealNetworks' email goes out to accounts of people that didn't solicit the messages. 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.