Fighting illegal spam

How do I get back at the spammers who don't comply w/ the law?

[dwilson]

The last few weeks, I've taken a more aggressive approach to the spam that shows up in my Y! Bulk Mail folder. Before I delete it, I go through and click the Unsubscribe links.

Not surprisingly, I am now getting less mail from lists that have valid Unsubscribe links. And a bigger percentage (and seemingly greater number) of my spam messages are from spammers that cheat.

I've seen spammers cheat 4 ways. They:

Provide a link to a 404 page.

Send email to an invalid mail box or one that is too full.

Provide a link to somebody else's remove page.

Provide no link at all.

My understanding is that this has been illegal in the US for a couple years now. What can be done about it? I'm getting rid of the spammers who, at least, play by the rules. But how do I get rid of those who are violating Federal law?

Thanks.
Daniel Wilson

[Dreamquick]

If you are sure they are a US company operating out of the US then I imagine you could have an effect legally - but then again I imagine these types of company will respect your unsubscribe requests in the first place.

Most of the spam you get is probably orignally from a US company but they are routing their email through other peoples machines - most of these machines are in non-english speaking countries, typically china.

Typically these admins either can't/won't secure their machines and just ignore the problem.

The biggest offenders are routinely flagged to allow others to immediately identify these questionable sources - the problem is that not every ISP uses these lists and there are always more unsecure machines for spammers to use.

- Tony

[pixel_juice]

Never click unsubscribe links in an email unless you trust the company who sent it. It's the spammers 'address verification' system.

Bounce the message back so it appears your address doesn't exist and they give up eventually.

[mil2k]

Never click unsubscribe links in an email unless you trust the company who sent it.It's the spammers 'address verification' system.

I would second that. Personal experience :(

[Dreamquick]

Bounce the message back so it appears your address doesn't exist and they give up eventually.

That doesn't work either - one of three things happen;
1) The mailbox is already full
2) The sender address is a complete fake
3) The mailbox is gone after the ISP cancels their free account

Either way you get *yet another* email, this time telling you about the bounce and you are still on the list. Real spammers by definition don't use a valid sender address - otherwise people would start throwing lawsuits around when they realised *exactly* how far away these companies really are.

There was something a while ago that said a large percentage of global spam comes from three or four professional spammers (oxymoron if ever there was one) based in the US, how long do you think they would exist if all their work was able to be traced back to them?

- Tony

[Monkscuba]

I try very hard to set junk mail filters to automatically delete emails with certain words or from certain domains, but the supply of spam mail is endless and there's always something getting through, usually the ones that are titled "information for you", or "re: your request" (can't delete those words automatically, so I switch to "block sender", but the sender is [e-mail]...

drives you mad. still need a beer.

[Dreamquick]

Monk,

Sounds like you need a mail package which verifies the sender address has a mailserver associated with it...

i.e. "[e-mail]" may look valid but unless they have bought the domain they wont be able to modify its DNS records to add mailservers, which would flag this as potential spam.

- Tony

[Monkscuba]

Sometimes we get the same mail like 20 times. This is beacause we have different emails on our web site to easily identify which page the sender has mailed from, ie

[e-mail]
[e-mail]
[e-mail]

Spammobot comes and harvests them all. The messages read:

"Widget, are you interested in a larger ****?" or

"Information for bluewidget"

Well, it's only a hundred or so every day..