Spam
Part 3
First of all, let's make clear what you shouldn't do about it:
•
Don't just ignore it. If the survival of the email isn't at stake, it's usefulness as a communications
medium certainly may be. We need to stop these people before they cripple free speech and commerce on the net.
•
Don't email to the sender or the "Reply here to be removed from our mailing list"
addresses. Both will just get you added to more mailing lists and result in your getting even more junk email.
• Don't engage in mailbombing, hacking or other illegal or unethical retaliation against spammers.
What you need to do is complain to the Internet Service Provider of the party who sent the junk, to the major services who provide the ISP with connectivity (Sprint, ATT, PacBell, etc.) and to any domains that helped forward the junk mail to you (at least so they're aware of it and can address the security of their mail servers). You also need to complain to your ISP to get them to beef up their filtering/blocking systems.
Deciphering mail header information and tracking through Whois, Traceroute and other means isn't that tough and there are several good tutorials on line and on the web pages to which I have provided links below.
Here's the boilerplate text I send, attached to a message with the original spam and complete header information:
You are receiving this message for one of the following reasons:
• This domain has been identified as the source of the following Unsolicited Junk Email
(Please take immediate action against the perpetrator)
• One of your mail servers has been used to forward the following Unsolicited Junk Email
(Please reconfigure your servers to prevent third-party relays)
• This domain has been FORGED into headers as the source of the following Unsolicited Junk Email
(You may wish to to take legal action as has successfully been persued by Hotmail, America Online and others)
• One of the providers you serve has been identified as the source of the following Unsolocited Junk Email
(Please take immediate action against the perpetrator)
U.S. Residents: Write to your Representatives in Congress
Join CAUCE!
The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email is a group which is working to fight junk email. They provide information to the public and to government officials about the problem of bulk email.
Join FREE
The Forum for Responsible and Ethical Email is a non-profit grassroots organization dedicated to educating the public about junk email and to providing ISPs and their customers with the software, personnel and knowledge necessary for ridding their own systems of spam.
Want to know more?
If you want more information on how to fight junk mail there are plenty of people who want to help. Try reading the newsgroup "news.admin.net-abuse.email" to get an idea of the extent of the problem and the best approaches to fighting back. There are also plenty of web pages devoted to the subject. Here are a few of the best, most of which have links to several others:
• The web site of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email
• The web site of FREE, the Forum for Responsible and Ethical Email
• Stop Junk Email (EXCELLENT SITE!)
• Blacklist of Internet Advertisers
Thwarting Free Speech - Killing Commerce - Elitism Vs. Democracy