LumberCartel.ca ✉ NANAE

The Lumber Cartel, local 42 (Canadian branch)

NANAE, which is an acronym for "news.admin.net-abuse.email" (sometimes also abbreviated as "n.a.n-a.e."), is a publicly accessible USENET newsgroup focused on the discussion of eMail spamming and serves as an unofficial international branch of the Lumber Cartel.

Although many of NANAE's frequent contributors are spam-fighters, spammers also regularly contribute by spamming the newsgroup or harrassing other contributors, which is why NANAE often gets a "hard-core" rating. Some blacklists have also been thought to gather intelligence about spammers from NANAE; as far as we know this is only a theory which probably developed because, over time, some eMail server administrators who reported, in their postings to NANAE, that a previous spam problem on their systems had been resolved, and consequently some blacklist operators removed their IP addresses from their databases (usually after verifying that the spam problem really was resolved, of course).

[NANAE] Culture

Wild controversy, conspiracy theories, fighting, insults, and outright hatred are almost always originating with spammers who are unhappy because their spamming operations were shut down, and so they use NANAE to express this anger.

Humour is fairly common in postings, which only adds to the frustration of spammers. Some people believe that humour is an important tool for dealing with NANAE because it prevents contributors from going insane (when posting to NANAE, don't be shy; let your humour be extra dry!).

Community

Although this isn't the best place to find professionalism due to the spammer contributions, the other regular contributors have been known to provide a lot of useful insight on a wide variety of topics mostly related to spam fighting, business, ethics, and cats (although mysterious, "cats" are considered to be "on topic" in NANAE). If you have a solution to the spam problem, this is an excellent place to present your idea as a way of testing its initial validity.

NANAE has also been an excellent resource for people who are new to eMail server operations because many products are configured in an unsecure manner by default. Usually, someone asking about setting up an eMail server for the first time will be well received, and will often see many helpful replies (and misleading replies from spammers who try to mess things up, so be careful to verify the information others share with you).

Spammer involvement

Warning: Unfortunately spammers regularly contribute their opinions, delusions, and other such nonsense, sometimes in an effort to harass and discourage spam-fighters. The flaws in any arguments they make are typically refuted by logical counter-arguments, which invariably lead to hostile ad hominem attacks by the spammer. A few spammers have been obsessing over NANAE for many years, and have been harassing NANAE's contributors with false accusations, threats of bodily harm, racist and other inappropriate remarks, and so forth. (Spammers should refrain from contributing to NANAE.)