PhoneBoy Explains: Spam

I can't believe how much Spam I got last week. No, I don't mean hate mail from Bill Gatus of Borg. I mean unsolicited advertising sent via email. My mail filter keeps a good deal of spam out of my inbox, but it still keeps copies of the spam. One such loser came from a guy on AOL. This clown wants to "personalize mouse pads" with whatever picture you choose to send to him. What I wanted to send him was that I didn't want his stupid mouse pads or his spam. I also mailed a copy to the AOL postmaster to see what they'd have to say about their members sending spam.

I got a "quick response" from an AOL represenative that addressed my issue. It was a form letter, but it got the message across. She writes:

Hm... well, given that the mail to the offending AOL member bounced shortly after I received this message from AOL, I'd say the user got their accounts taken away. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out.

Another winner in the Spam contest was pushing ways to make money off of Multi-Level-Marketing schemes. Two strikes against him already because not only do I hate Spam, I hate Multi-Level-Marketing. But this bozo gets three strikes: My mail filter picked up his spam and sent him the usual "if it's unsolicitied email, remove me" messages. But his response to that was: the same spam he sent me before, only longer and more verbose. I sent this bozo's postmaster some email. Guess what: same spam message I got when my auto-responder sent him email. So I tracked down this bozo's Internet Service Provider and informed them of the spamming.

Want to know how to track down someone's ISP? Check out my "How To Track Down Spammers" link, which will explain how to do this. It's a little more than I want to get into in the main report, but useful information none the less.

How Spammers Find Out About You

Spammers look thru mailing list archives and Usenet postings and pull your email address from the messages. Anytime you communicate in a public forum, your email is subject to being  grabbed by anyone -- including spammers. The latest trick to thwart spammers is to put a "fake" from addresses in your Usenet and mailing list postings. If you're using a news or mail reading client on the PC, this is pretty easy to do. If you post from a Unix shell account, it's a little more difficult to automatically do, but it's not  impossible. Unfortunately, these fake "from" lines can cause an inconvienance for those who really want to get a hold of you privately because of a posting on the Internet.

Some of the more "enteraining" examples of the fake reply-to addresses come from people with their own domains. For instance, the owner of rahul.net uses "dhesi@spams.r.us.com." My personal favorite basically says it all: "good.luck@ttempting.to.spam.schaft.com." In kind, I've set mine to "its.a.b@d.idea.to.spam.uplink.com"

One person took this idea to an extreme. He puts a fake email in his "from" address: "hey.look@my.sig.for.an.email.address". Then, he doesn't even put a parsable address down there (something of a user@domain format. Basically, in order for you to get email back to this guy, a reasonably intellegent human being has to figure  out what his email address is and type it in manually. You can't even cut and paste it out of his message. I like the idea, but it's somewhat extreme.

What's Being Done

Yet another person out there is trying to get the mail filters of the world to unite and share information. Ron Guilmette is working on his own "spam filtering" program  that will allow users to share "blacklists" of known spammers with each other so that we can "allow people to work together over the Net and filter all this stuff out  and finally put these [spammers] out of business.'' Of course, making information widely known about spammers is a double-edged sword. Once the spammers  address is known and published, they can just use a different address to get around the filters.

Some ISPs and free email-services offer some level of anti-spam protection. The home-grown program I've made to protect myself from getting spammed suits my
needs quite well, but does not go quite as far as one ISP I know of: a2i communications. They can, if you wish, scan all incoming email for certain "key words" that
appear in most forms of spam and prevent them from hitting your inbox. You can specify just how agressively it scans. I don't quite go that far, though my program is  flexible enough that I could do this sort of scanning if I wanted.

If you're tired of getting spam, check with your ISP or email provider to see what forms of spam protection they offer. Or take action and do something about it yourself! Check out my piece on how to filter spam!

Last Update: 26 July 1997
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