Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[James Manning <jmm AT sublogic.com>]

> Reasons I'm certain it's spam:
> (1) It's a sales pitch, however subtle.
> (2) The return address (name) and signed name don't match:
> Blythe Wall vs. Candace
> (3) The return address and return path don't match:
> northstate.net vs. ponyexpress.neonova.net
> 
> And just out of curiosity, who the heck is NeoNova.net?
> WHOIS:
> NeoNova Network Services (NEONOVA2-DOM)
> 1000 Perimeter Park. Suite K
> Morrisville, NC 27560

FWIW, neonova's CTO is Jay Cuthrell, former member of this list (he
was talking about his issues with INW's mailing list at the last
trilug meeting with Jeremy Portzer and myself).

It sounds like fighting spam is 90%+ of his efforts these days, so he
takes it pretty seriously.

However, the #2 and #3 points aren't necessarily "this is spam" in
this case - the situation is that neonova is a "meta-isp", so
basically they provide ISP services to places that wanna provide ISP
services to their customers (like *very* rural telephone companies,
literally owned by farmers and ranchers because they had the lines
installed to talk to each other).  Places like northstate.net (I don't
know for a fact that they're a customer of neonova, I'm just going on
that assumption for this sentence :) would have neonova do all the
actual ISP heavy lifting (mail services, web space, spam filtering,
etc.) and just resell that to their customers.

So, IMHO, the #1 point is the only one really potentially valid.

It may indeed be spam, but at the moment I would guess that it doesn't
"smell" like it.  But, UCE is UCE, so take that as you will :)
-- 
James Manning <http://www.sublogic.com/james/>
GPG Key fingerprint = B913 2FBD 14A9 CE18 B2B7  9C8E A0BF B026 EEBB F6E4