Rick Godwin of snowboard.com:

I visited your website and I see that you allow anyone to sign up for free and get an 
instant email account on your server.  You've
opened Pandora's box and this is the result.  Blaming IMail for this little disaster 
isn't quite fair.

I was able to sign up with totally bogus information, including the 'backup email' and 
found no requirement to confirm I'm a real
person by email verification or anything else.  I then took that garbage email account 
and the garbage password and your publicly
available mail server of smtp.snowboard.com and plugged it into my outlook express and 
sent a quick test message to an alternate
mail account and it went through perfectly.

I could have just as easily plugged that info into any mail bomber program and used 
you as a relay without restriction.  Webmail
isn't your problem...scripting to the compose screen is actually the harder route.  
Blasting through SMTP given the username,
password, and server is considerably easier.

You've thrown all sense of security and authentication 'down the mountain' and 
effectively begged the world to use you as an
authenticated relay.  I don't know who your development team is, but I'm thinking you 
should fire them and tell us so that none of
us make the mistake of hiring those idiots.  Either they came up with the idea to do 
what you've done, or they did it on your order,
but in either case they should've known better.  This might have been avoided by 
putting new members on something like a 15-day
probation membership and then offering them a fee-based email account on a credit 
card, using full address verification and security
checks to limit fraud.

Yes, you're getting blacklisted, and rightly so.  If you shut that system off now, you 
'might' get back in good graces and off the
blacklists in 3-6 months, assuming you're prepared to do a considerable amount of 
begging and atonement for what you've done.  Wait
till your upstream provider gets wind of this and realizes that you've damaged them by 
poisoning the IP addresses assigned to you.
That' a nice liability you've exposed yourself to and it may get you shut down and 
sued on top of everything else.

Good luck.



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