O/T SPAM

[Victor Odhner]

mike wrote:
> What if I set up a web site giving e-mail address,
> and offensives of people doing this spamming, and
> post it on the web and asked people to e-mail
> these offensivers?

Please clarify:  What do you mean by "offensives of
people doing this spamming?"  What is an offensive?
What are "offensivers"?  I may not be up on the
latest jargon in this field.

> If anyone has any thought on this idea let me know.

Yes, retaliatory spam was one of the first things
tried, and it turns out not to be a constructive
approach.  One of the main reasons is that it is
very hard to identify the real culprits.

The billing, tech support and admin contacts for
sites that relay spam are often invalid addresses,
so along with your spam you'll just get a bunch
of bounced complaints to weed out.

There is an RFC requirement for the address of
"postmaster" at any mail-sending domain to reach
a real person.  The sites where this is true
are the sites that don't have open relays.
Some postmaster addresses are simply undefined,
which is a clear RFC violation.

My experience with complaining to postmasters of
spamming sites is that they rarely reply or take
responsible action, and many are simply too swamped
(or too laid-off) to pay attention.
Postmaster@Excite.com used to reject messages with
an automatic notice to complain to someone else.

Have you studied all the information at cauce.org?

As far as direct action is concerned, look at
these links:
  http://www.cauce.org/about/resources.shtml

I have recently stopped using spamcop because
it resulted in black-holing of sites that some
of my important mail was coming through, and
I lost traffic without even knowing about it.
The site where I get my serious e-mail is now
accepting spam more freely, and I am just
dealing with it because the alternative is worse.

It is REALLY hard to identify where spam
comes from, because of injection of false
headers.  And in my case, I had my e-mail
automatically forwarded from one site to another,
then I got some spam and complained about it --
this caused my own relaying site to be
black-holed!  So you really, REALLY need to
be careful not to throw the baby out with
the bath-water.

Vic