Reporting Spam

Do any of you do this?

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Two of my email addresses get lots of spam. They are for two completely unrelated businesses. I often receive spam on both of them from companies that look pukka but they are obviously using spam lists.

For example this morning I received two emails from a plant and industrial hire company here in the UK. Neither of my email addresses are for businesses that could be remotely interested in what they offer. Clearly they are using a list that they have obtained from spammers and sending out email indiscriminately to many thousands (millions?) of people.

They may be legal since they clearly display their address and company registration number. They also have an unsubscribe via a URL within their own domain.

This practise really riles me because I have to deal with it on a daily basis, legal or not.

Is there anything we can do to combat it? Is it legal? Is there any means of reporting them?

[Mr Bo Jangles]

I've started reporting to knujon com
I send *daily* e-mails to them (a Thunderbird extension) of the contents of my Junk folder.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Thanks. I had a look at their website and while their philosophy is laudable the state of their website does not inspire me with confidence.

They also seem to deal with only the usual suspects. I am talking about legitimate companies who spam me. These have full address, contact details and company registration numbers available.

[Frank_Rizzo]

report spam? Absolutely. Well not for the thousands of 'enhancement' products but certainly for UK businesses spamming ME directly.

First, a reminder of the rules now. This government, in all it's attempts to smooch up to businesses, allows the free spamming to company individuals but not to personal individuals.

If I ran a construction firm and emailed Gordon Brown at his hotmail address I am spamming.

If I send exactly the same email to Gordon but at his work address (.gov.uk) then I am not spamming.

That's the crazy rules we have here at the moment and this is why I get loads of UK spam for company cars to water coolers sent to me at my business email but not my personal email.

I did not enquire about any of those products so IMO they are blatant spam and no tainted spam law is going to stop me reporting them.

All UK business spam sent to any of my business / website / work addresses (where I have never asked for info or made contact) are spamcopped.

[edited by: Frank_Rizzo at 11:49 am (utc) on April 5, 2007]

[RonPK]

Here in .nl businesses are allowed to send business proposals to other businesses, either by ordinary mail or by email. Such email may be considered spam by the internet community, but it's not illegal.

Over the years I've received many pens, calculators, and even a set of Blue Men Group drum sticks :)

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I can understand emails from companies offering me services targeted to my business but this morning I got one from a company offering me plant hire equipment?!?

It should surely be illegal to send emails offering products and services that are totally irrelevant. To me this proves conclusively that they are using harvested email lists, which are sent indiscriminately. It should not be allowed.

Any ideas on how best to report it?

[JudgeJeffries]

Glad I've got a speelchocker and wont make those mistakes.
I'm vindictive and sometimes have spammed back.
No technology just keep pressing send for the same nonsense message after I find out the sales managers email.

[Fiver]

I recently reported the where are you now people as spammers. I never signed up for an account, and when I went to unsubscribe of course I couldn't log in - I didn't have an account. A 'lost password' request had them send me a password that I have never once in my life used. I'm a paranoid computer geek. I use good passwords, not passwords like 'richard'. ever.

aaaaand I continued to receive spam after I had unsubscribed. surprise surprise, spammers ignore rules. I couldn't even go through the unsub process again because my account truly had been deleted... from everything except their email lists I guess.

wayn has a 'we dont spam' trust.e button on their site, so I filed a full and formal spam report with them. I had to go the extra mile, but it worked. I no longer get wayn spam.

But I've never had any other success 'reporting' spam... and the spammers themselves even being identifiable, much less having a trust.e account, is likely pretty rare.

[londrum]

following links on spam emails just proves to them that your address is real - and you'll end up getting more spam.

for genuine companies it's no so bad, because--like you say--you can unsubscribe. but don't bother trying with the other ones. they don't care!

[Frank_Rizzo]

BDW, yes, spamcop.

But make sure you hide your domain before reporting as spamcop is instant, and can inform the spammers directly as well as the webhost, isp etc.

A couple of years ago I had a spam from an office supplies company. I'm not interested in their stuff - I didn't ask for it and IMO it was spam.

I reported them via spamcop and within half hour I had this guy phoning me up complaining that I had him blacklisted.

The mistake I made was to paste the full email and headers in the spamcop report. It seems that the spammer was a contact for the domain and thus received a copy of the full headers.

I think spamcop are / were supposed to mung the info so that the reporter is not identifiable but clearly spammers can get around this by individualising emails such as click here?something=12314515152

Anyway, I got a nasty phone call from this dude (he got the phone # from my contact details) and that made me ensure that I always "search and replace" all spam reports before I submit them.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I don't like Spamcop. I had a bad experience with them before. I commented in a forum and my commment was copied along with my email address and sent out as a quote in a mail shot by another company. Next thing I new I was blacklisted because my email address was listed in the mail shot and I never even sent the damn thing! The company who sent the mail shot were not spammers either. These guys are too indiscriminate.

My point is that there should be a formal complaints process against "legitimate" companies who do this. I don't mind if they know it was me who made the complaint. In fact I would be proud of it!

[Frank_Rizzo]

OK, were the emails sent to you as an individual? If so sue.

search for

spamlegalaction

Nigel Roberts became the first person to win a court judgment over a company's breach of the UK's anti-spam law.

Then search for

scotchspam

Gordon Dick was the next to sue.

This needs to snowball like the bank charges claims. If more people filled in spam reports and threatened to sue then spam here will dry up quicker than a spam fritter on a hotplate.

[wyweb]

You can look at the headers of the spam email. If they're not forged you can ascertain (sometimes) which ISP or website it was sent from. Some spammers use scripts to send their spam email. They'll register a cheap dot info domain, get it hosted and then upload their script and email list and they're in business. If the headers are legit you can do a whois on the IP addresses and determine where the email originated. This will often give you the host and from there you can complain to them. Most reputable hosts have a zero tolerance policy concerning spam. If the spammer is using a reputable host (and most don't), you may have some luck going this route. Back in the day when spam really, really bothered me, I managed to get 5 or 6 sites knocked offline using this process (which is all spamcop does anyway). It's time consuming, works only 5% of the time and can be extremely frustrating.

Having said all that.. eventually I found that the satisfaction of taking one of these creeps offline (it only takes them a few hours to get back in business) did NOT outweigh the time and trouble it took to report them so I've pretty much given up on it and now rely almost totally on banning and filtering. I can't beat them and I don't want to join them so now I try to ignore them. If it's a good day and everything's running smoothly and my attitude is positive, they don't bother me at all.

My point is that there should be a formal complaints process against "legitimate" companies who do this.

Report them in to their host.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

You can look at the headers of the spam email. If they're not forged you can ascertain (sometimes) which ISP or website it was sent from.

Thanks but there is no need to do this. As I said previously the email points directly to their website domain name and it was sent from that domain. trheir identity is not in any doubt.

[wyweb]

Then the job is even easier as most spammers go to great lengths to conceal theirs. The same formula still applies - report them to their host. If it is actually spam and not something that you opted in for (knowingly or not) you can sometimes bring it to a screeching halt with a well placed email to abuse at.

[Frank_Rizzo]

wyweb, I think there is a mix up here with the type of spam.

This is not the male enhancement / casino / stock share type spam which are sent out via botnets, and open proxies from overseas countries.

This is spam from numpties who have bought email lists (or crudely gathered them themselves with a $29.95 harvesting tool) and then procede to spam UK businesses.

The problem is that they probably don't even think they are doing anything wrong. Not only that but reporting them to their webhost won't do much because the webhost know that these sites are established businesses which pay bills and were not created yesterday to do a spam run today.

This is why people like the two listed above have sued and won.

I'm waiting for my next spam email sent to 'Frank' offering me a BMW for £99 per week, or a water cooler for my office. I have an email template standing by ....

[edited by: Frank_Rizzo at 4:51 pm (utc) on April 6, 2007]

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

This is spam from numpties who have bought email lists (or crudely gathered them themselves with a $29.95 harvesting tool) and then procede to spam UK businesses.

Precisely!

[vik_c]

I generally don't report spam. I've found that done on a large scale, this gives the spam blacklist companies too much power and it eventually throws out the baby with the bath water. You could complain about spam one day and the next day wonder why your own mails/newsletters end up in junk mail folders or worse, bounce back. It's much easier to use a mail filtering tool. How hard is it to detect 'casino' in a mail and delete it on the server? Simple rules in Outlook Exprsss or small freeware/shareware utilities make life easier. Just my 2c. To each his own.

[blend27]

Greylisting

The rest 1 polite(not) message to hosting or on hosting forum works even better, they will shot it down before you are finished typing

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I reported this latest one to the spammer's host and got an email back saying they would "deal accordingly" with them.

I hope it involves pulling out their toenails ;)

[londrum]

how about making them eat some spam?
a can of spam for every hundred emails.