TO: joelonely@aol.com
FROM: candycane@sexygirls.com
SUBJECT: Hi :-)
Hi Joe,
I was over at this awesome site and I immediately thought of you. It's just the place if
you're lonely and you're looking for some excitement since I went back to school.
I loved all the time we spent together, but since I've got my new boyfriend now, I know
you're probably looking for a new lover. Check it out: www.somesexsite.com
Candy
Are you wondering how someone else's email seems to have ended up in your mailbox? It's
not really someone else's. You've been targeted by a spammer, and you've got
spam!
What Is Spam? What's a Spammer?
"Spammers" are people who fill up your email with unsolicited commercial messages. Most of
the time, they are for porno sites, scams (pyramid and "make money fast" schemes, chain
letters, penny stock frauds, and even offers to buy merchandise for you with stolen credit
cards,etc.), or solicitations for software and services to do more bulk email (more spam).
"Save trees" they shout, trying to make their intrusion on your mailbox some sort of
environmental cause as they fill it up with their garbage that causes your real
email to bounce from an overfilled box. "This is NOT Spam" they argue in their opening
statement, a sure sign that it IS spam. "Here is the information you requested," they
offer, when you requested nothing and they got you off a bulk mail list. "Only looking for
10 people" they claim in their promise of "Fortune 500 company will pay you $2000 to $5000
per week!" that they send to 10 million people.
Why do they do this? Shady companies and con artists are scouring the Internet looking for
targets -- people who will believe anything that they read in email. They have to send
large amounts, because most of the people on the Internet today can read well enough to
understand that a "degree from a prestigious non-accredited university" means a worthless
piece of paper (for $300, no less), so it takes a lot of emails to find those few people
who are still gullible or novice enough to send their checks off to some PO Box (you don't
think the spammer would give you an address you could actually track him down after he's
cashed your check, do you?) and expect that they are going to get something valuable.
NEVER buy anything from a spammer. Reputable businesses do NOT spam.
Why ISPs Cancel Spammers
Spamming, or bulk email, is against the policy of every legitimate and responsible ISP and
usually results in the immediate cancellation of the spammer's account. It also is illegal
to send spam from, or to residents of, California and Washington. That does not deter
them, but instead, what they do is forge the address from which the spam is sent to try to
keep themselves from being tracked down. As soon as they are cancelled on one ISP, they
simply go to another and keep spamming. Often, spammers will relay through a mail server
in a foreign country, counting on the relay site's inability to speak English or US
recipients saying "what can I do? It's coming from Romania" to keep the relay from being
blocked when users complain. If you look at the WebTV AntiSpam page of currently-blocked email
servers, you will see a large number of them are in foreign countries.
Because they forge the sending address, "bounced mail" often ends up bouncing back to the
mail server that was shown in the forgery, even though it may have had nothing to do with
it. We have had our domain name forged in headers of three spams, and each time, it
flooded our mail server with tens of thousands of bounced messages (from bad addresses)
and kept our ordinary mail from getting in or out. Spammers also will forge the email
addresses of legitimate businesses in the "From" field, flooding the innocent business
with complaints about the spam. It is the business disruption that comes with spamming
that is the reason that California has made it illegal. Unfortunately, because spammers
rarely use their real names or email addresses, it makes them very hard to catch.
One of the reasons that spammers try to hide is that some of them have been successfully
(and painfully) sued by AOL, CompuServe, and other large networks. Several years ago,
there were "spam houses" who were officially in the business of sending out spam.
How To Shut Down Spammers
If you are really annoyed by the spam that clogs your mail (I sure am), you can join the
fight against it by reporting spammers to the ISP where they dialed in. To do this
effectively is a bit of work, and you need to learn how to read email headers to decipher
where they're really coming from. But it can be an amusing pasttime that gives a certain
amount of satisfaction (if they're showing a home page or an email address to contact for
more information, be sure to report to those domains as well.
If you'd like to try, here are two articles to get you started: Spambusting! How to Shut Them Down Taking Revenge on a Spammer
If you don't want to be bothered (and I don't blame you, either), then make sure your spam
block is turned on and report the spammer to spam@corp.webtv.net (if you're on WebTV), or
set up spam filters in your email client and just try to live with the junk that gets
through. Do, though, report stock scams to enforcement@sec.gov -- a lot of these "Investor
Advice" emails that you're probably receiving are stock frauds and you do the world a
favor when you send the Feds after them.
Keeping Spam Out of Your Mailbox
A lot of people regularly change their email addresses to try to defeat spam, never post
in newsgroups, never sign guest books, nor put their email addresses on their web pages.
Spammers have "spiders" that crawl the Net constantly looking for email addresses, and any
that they find end up on spam lists (it's the reason that we don't show full email
addresses, unless specifically requested, when we publish what people write to us on
Net4TV Voice -- it's so their addresses won't get picked up from our pages).
There's another way, though, that you may be ending up on more and more spam lists -- when
you believe the BS at the bottom of the letter that says "to remove yourself from our
mailing list, just send an email to someaddress@somewhere.com."
Don't do it!! When you do, you have just confirmed that your email address is
valid, and you have guaranteed that you are going to get more, not less, spam. Invalid
email addresses don't help spammers. Notice that the offers of email addresses that are
probably some of the spam that you're receiving talk about "fresh, validated email
addresses," and "remove lists" is one of the major ways they get validated. This person
spamming you is already violating his ISP's terms of service and hiding his true identity
when he sends you the spam. You're going to trust that he's going to remove you just
because he says so?
But the favorite way of all that spammers get email addresses is from starting hoaxes:
prayer requests, "funnies" that people forward to big address lists (and that are designed
for forwarding in email, like the 'tweety bird' picture), rumors about non-existent
viruses, bogus email taxes, and anything else that they can get people to forward to a
large address list. Sooner or later, someone forwards it to an address of someone who is
working with a spammer and all of the email addresses that are shown in all of the
forwards are harvested for spam lists. ANY email that wants you to forward it on -- even
if the email looks legit or purports to be the wish of a dying child -- is nothing but
spam bait.
People think they are helping their friends by forwarding it on. They don't realize that,
not only are they not helping them, they are hurting them by revealing their email
addresses to the spammers. There are several WebTV users who have had their accounts
cancelled for spamming, even though they had nothing to do with sending any spam, because
their email addresses were forged. With at least of one of them, whom we helped get
re-instated, and who had NEVER emailed anyone except her daughter, guess where the
spammers got her address? Her daughter was including her on "forwards" and, in doing so,
gave her email address away to the world.
Recently, I saw one of these the was supposedly from the teacher of a third-grade class,
saying that their "geography project" was sending out these forwards and asking people to
put down their addresses as well as their email addresses, "so his class can see how their
email goes around the world." In fact, there is no such school or third grade class -- it
was a spammer looking for a way to connect people's real-world addresses (from which you
can get their real names and other information) with the email address. Can you imagine
how dangerous this could be? Don't forward chain emails, and don't believe ANYTHING you
read in them.
The Future of Spam
California and Washington have laws against unsolicited commercial email, and a number of
other states are considering them. But unfortunately, we're not likely to have any relief
until we have Federal laws.
There almost was a law passed last year, but there are powerful lobbies opposing it -- the
Direct Marketers. They like the idea of letting your ISP (and ultimately, you) pay the
cost of handling the mail that fills up your box with junk, rather than them having to pay
for paper and postage for snail mail junk. They so gutted the anti-spam bill that the
organizations like the Coalition Against Unsolicited
Commercial Email ultimately opposed the bill themselves -- it had actually been
modified until it legitimized spam.
But there is hope for us. A good Anti-Spam Bill, HR 3113, has
just passed the Telecommunitions, Trade and Consumer Protection Subcommittee of the US
House of Representatives, and there is hope that it may pass the Commerce Committee and
the US House as a whole, while there are plans for a companion bill in the Senate.
What can you do to fight spam? Read the link above so that you can learn about the
Anti-Spam Bill, and then write to your Congressman and tell him or her "support HR
3113."
Wouldn't it be nice to open your mailbox one day and find only mail from your friends?
