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By
Konrad Roeder
c. 1997 Konrad Roeder
Although
Spam is a trademark for the ham-based luncheon meat product
made by Hormel, it appears that the name has stuck to unsolicited
Bulk e-mail as well. Reportedly, it got its name from a
Monty Python skit.
We have
all received e-mails with some outrageous subject lines
like “Amazing Discovery”, “Who’s making
money on the Internet” or some other absurd or explicit
claim. Sometimes this stuff just seems to come in waves.
I have received up to 50 of these e-mails just in one day.
It becomes very difficult to find all of the real e-mail
that is addressed to me from all of the spam.
Often, the e-mail comes with a claim that if you reply to
the e-mail with “remove” in the subject line,
you will simply be removed from the mailing list. Actually,
this false claim is often used to put you on another list
of valid e-mail addresses. Since you responded to the e-mail,
there is a live body attached to the address. You may not
be interested in the most recent e-mailing, but soon you
will be tempted with another bargain or deal.
You
can try filtering out the probable spam from your e-mail.
With most decent e-mail packages, you can filter your e-mail
against rules that look at headers and/or the body of the
e-mail. You can set up your e-mail program to automatically
reply to or discard e-mail that matches certain patterns.
There are entire lists of e-mail addresses known to send
unsolicited Bulk e-mail. Also, there are lists of keywords
that may be offensiv. The source for these is simply too
large to post here.
You
can also complain about it to the sender’s Internet
Service Provider. The difficulty lies in that many of the
unsolicited bulk e-mails come with forged return e-mail
addresses. It is the same as putting someone else’s
return address on junk mail. There are currently no laws
against this practice. However, with a little training,
you can read the full header of the e-mail and then send
back a complaint to postmaster@<domain> or abuse@<domain>
where <domain> is the proper domain of the source
of the e-mail. In this letter, you need to state that you
do not wish to receive further Unsolicited Bulk e-mail from
this account. Include a copy of the e-mail, including full
headers, in the complaint. Sometimes, if you are very lucky,
you will get back an e-mail stating that the account was
canceled for violation of their policy.
So where
do these folks get your e-mail address to begin with? Often,
you have simply given these folks your e-mail address. While
surfing the Web, there may be a page that asked you for
your e-mail address. Unless there is a statement that says
that they will not sell your address to anyone else, often
your e-mail address will be sold to companies that trade
e-mail lists.
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