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Spam


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Spam is unsolicited commercial email.

It is always a brutal exploitation and always irritating, and most often has to do with get rich quick schemes and porn sites. It's very hard to stop.

You should know how to retrieve an entire email letter - including the headers - so that you can report all instances of spam you receive to the proper authorities. (This is another reason why MS email clients are not that hot. Email is a strictly text mode business, yet Microsoft has obfuscated even this.)

You should make a complete copy of any and all spam letters you receive and send them to your ISP. The normal email account for spam is 'abuse@MY.ISP' - just put 'abuse@' in front of their domain name.

Another way to find out who to send to is to use our Spike and direct its Whois function at 'whois.abuse.net'. Put the name of the domain in the 'Query' box and Spike will give you the email address, if any, for spam reports at that domain.

You should also send a complete copy of any and all spam letters to the United States Federal Trade Commission at the following email address: 'uce@ftc.gov'.

The reason you send the spam to your ISP is so that your ISP can take action against the spammer and if possible filter future spam out. Some ISPs are notorious for doing next to nothing to stop the flow of spam, so your letters will also prod them a bit in the right direction. The reason you send a copy to the Federal Trade Commission is to help them fight their battle against spam.

How did the spammers get my email address?

Good question. There are a number of methods. Some spammers actually pay other spammers for mailing lists, and some companies crawl the web looking for email addresses to put on these lists.

One of the best sources of email addresses is Usenet - the news groups. You'll notice if you ever go into Usenet that many people obfuscate their email addresses. This is to fool programs run by the spammers. They might write something like 'mike@NOSPAMatt.net' - the spammers's program will pick up the entire email address and the spam will never reach its destination, but other readers will be able to figure out what Mike's real email address is.

Another good source of email addresses are the web sites themselves. Some rather seasoned webmasters avoid all email addresses on their sites. Internet law states that there must always be one email address for any given domain that must respond - 'postmaster@' - and they count on intelligent users to figure this out if they feel they need to correspond.

However the spammers get your email address, there's precious little you can do about it once the word is out, so it pays to be careful right from the beginning. Don't go off posting to Usenet until you understand what's going on and how spammers will be combing the Usenet files for new victims. Learn how to obfuscate your email address for this purpose. It might be sensible to have a dedicated news group email client as well.

Why is spam bad?

Spam is bad because it's unsolicited and very irritating, but above all because it's unfair and represents a cost we all have to pay and the spammer does not. Spamming is reprehensible - the spammers know their wacky schemes will be ignored by the great majority of the recipients, but they're counting on just enough to fall for the bait so they can make their quick million and get out of Dodge. The business operations behind spam letters are often completely illegal.

Spam exploits the Internet mail system, which tries to do a great job to deliver all possible mail under all possible circumstances. When a spammer assembles a new spam to send out, he will be using unpaid for resources to send out hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of letters all at once. He might break into a remote server at a university for example, and bounce his spam off a relay there. Whatever illicit method is used, the bandwidth consumed by spam is not paid for by the spammer - it's paid for by you.

Because spam increases the Internet email traffic dramatically, ISPs and other companies are forced to charge higher prices to cover their costs of getting the job done, and that cost is passed on to you.

Read more about spam and how to fight it at cauce.org and samspade.org.

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