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WolfeNet's Frequently Asked Questions About Spam
- What is this e-mail,
and what is it doing in my mailbox?
It's an advertisement. It's also called "unsolicted bulk e-mail (UBE)" or "unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE)", and is considered to be one of the biggest no-no's on the Internet. Basically, someone decides to advertise their product or service by sending one piece of e-mail to 500 or 1000 or more e-mail addresses. It just happens that you were one of the lucky ones to receive a copy of the mailing. The Usenet equivalent of this is called "spam." Examples of this are "Make Money Fast" schemes, pyramid schemes, multi-level-marketing (MLM) schemes, and ads for adult pornography sites that are posted to newsgroups that have nothing to do with the actual topic.
- Well, I don't want it. How do I get rid of it?
Just delete it.
- No, I meant, how do I make sure I never get any more?
That's the tricky thing. There is no one surefire way to stop receiving any unsolicited e-mail. One thing that people do when posting to Usenet is to make their return addresses "username@domain.com.no.spam" and then in the signature say, "Remove the no.spam to reply." Bulk e-mailers usually get their addresses from Usenet postings, and only skim off the addresses, not the actual articles, but this is only a stopgap since a person who does bulk e-mail will get the bounce of that mail and may decipher what your actual address is. There are some programs out there that will supposedly help filter out unwanted e-mail, but I've yet to see one that works well.
- So what can I do about it?
Report it! If the mail comes from a recognizable domain like aol.com, netcom.com, halcyon.com, wolfenet.com, etc. just send a copy of the mail or news article to the postmaster@domain.com or to abuse@domain.com at those domains. It helps if you can provide a full header of the article or mail so that they can pinpoint the user. Usually, any ISP that gets reports of spam will terminate the user's account quickly to prevent them from continuing.
You can also politely send mail to the person who sent you the ad, and ask them to take you off their mailing list. By law, they are supposed to take you off.
If you use Unix, you can use a Unix based mail filter called procmail. You will have to write your own procmail scripts, as we don't have any ready ones to give you to use. If you need information on procmail, log into the shell account and type man procmail and hit <Enter> or <Return>; you will also want to look at man procmailrc. These are on-line manuals of how to use procmail. Be warned: procmail is not for beginners!
Finally, some people send replies to unsolicited mail saying, "Thank you for your request for consultation. Apparently you were not aware that I charge my fees in advance, and that receipt of another e-mail like the one I just received is tacit approval of my fees. My fees are as follows:" However, there has yet to be proof of anyone actually collecting their stated fees.
It's a little different, however, on newsgroups. If you see a posting that is obviously an ad (for example, Make Money FAST!!!!), you can do a couple of things about it. If you can determine where the posting came from and can identify the provider, report the spammer to that provider, and the account will likely be pulled. If you can, and your newsreader supports killfiles, put the original e-mail address in your killfile. Better yet, if you can filter and kill by subject, put the following words and symbols into your global killfile: money, cash, $, !!!!
Yes, you might end up killing something you want to read, but it will drastically reduce the amount of spam you'll see, and as far as Usenet goes, no news is good news.
You might also see addresses like no_spam@aol.com or something similar. You can do this also, if you want, but please put something the nospam or similar add-in to the domain section of the address, not the username. If you wrote something like nospam.username@wolfenet.com, our server may spend some time trying to find a user called "nospam.username" and may accidentally deliver it to a WolfeNet user. If you put nospam in the domain, the spammer's mail server will reject it as a bad domain, and it will never even get to our server, or to you.
We also have three usernames at Wolfenet that automatically delete any mail sent to those mailboxes. The usernames are nospam@wia.com, nobody@wia.com, and bitbucket@wia.com. So, for your e-mail address, you can put bitbucket@wia.com, but in the signature, you would want to have something telling people what your real address is and what address to reply to.
- Why can't I just get revenge by sending a core dump?
Well, you could, but you'd lose your account most likely. Turning around and spamming a spammer is not the best way to deal with the problem. If you send very large attachments to a spammer, the person who is hosting his or her account may turn around and complain to your ISP that you are trying to explode their mail server. This will most likely get your account terminated.
Also, if you send a core dump to someone, what if the address they give you is bogus? The core dump will bounce right back and probably crash your own mail spool, and you will more than likely get your account terminated for mis-use of the servers. Just take our advice, don't try it. There are better ways to deal with the problem than that.
The same kind of warning goes for newsgroups. So someone sends out Make Money FAST!!!! You reply to it saying, "Go away you pathetic loser!" But you also quoted the entire original spam. This is not a good thing. Basically you are wasting everybody's time by replying. The original poster isn't going to even see it as they don't read the newsgroups they're spamming, and you are more than likely going to get flamed, or have others complain to your provider about your bad netiquette. Again, the best way to deal with a spammer is ignore him, killfile him, and report him to his provider if you have that information.
- Well, if other people are sending bulk e-mail, why shouldn't I be able to?
This is the biggest rationalization used for unsolicited e-mail. "Well, everybody else does it!" That's no excuse. Basically, you would be committing theft every time you sent out a bulk e-mail. If your own ISP figures out what you're doing and shuts you down, you'll probably start forward your bulk mails through a different mail server. You are now stealing service since you are using their SMTP server without their permission and without paying for it.
If you do send spam and bulk e-mails, this will also bog down the mail and news servers, slowing down and possibly crashing them. Let's say you get a mailing list of one million e-mail addresses and you want to send out a mass mailing to all of them. So you send out 500 e-mails per minute. That will take you almost 34 hours to complete. This means that you are putting a constant demand on your mail server for 34 hours, which will mean that others that are trying to use the service are going to experience timeouts, disconnects from the mail server, and inability to send or receive mail. You are now stealing service from them since they will not be able to use the system while you are spamming.
On the Usenet side of things, let's say that you want to Make Money FAST!!!! So, you cross-post your little plan to five thousand newsgroups. That means that the news server you are using is now going to send out five thousand copies of your posting which other uninformed losers are going to copy and post back. Let's do a little math on this. Let's say that only two people decide to take you up on your offer, and that it procreates in this fashion for four generations and that each one sends out five thousand postings. That means that in a few days, your news server will now contain 163,840,000 postings about Make Money FAST!!!! And that is only after four steps! This will eventually choke your server, and make it impossible for anybody else to read news. Before you ask, yes, people do cross-post these things to five thousand newsgroups. Sometimes they go for broke and post to twenty thousand.
Also, think about those folks who are paying a per hour charge to connect to the Internet, or those who have to call long-distance. You've made them pay for connect time to download your ad. How would you like to be charged postage due by the post office for each Publisher's Clearing House packet that comes along?
You're really only setting yourself up for a lot of trouble if you try sending bulk e-mails or spamming Usenet. There are other less annoying ways to go about advertising on the Internet.
Finally, if you're a Wolfenet user, you may want to check out our Acceptable Use Policy and read the parts on Commercial Advertisements, Make Money Fast, and Spoofing E-mail and News Posts. This will explain our stand on spam and bulk e-mail in case you have any doubts about how serious we are about this.
- What mail programs will help filter this mail, then?
Only a few, actually. Unlike procmail, which filters mail at the server level, these programs will filter mail to the Trash for you so you don't have to go through the bother of deleting it yourself. However, a couple of mail programs that will handle this include Eudora Light and Pro, Outlook Express, and Pegasus Mail. The documentation that comes with these mail programs will tell you how to set up these filters.
- Washington State Spam Law
On June 11 1998, Washington State put the country's first Anti-Spam law into effect.
This law forbids the sending of junk email from computers in Washington or to email accounts held by Washington State residents. According to this legislation commercial e-mail is in violation if:
- It uses a third party's Internet domain name without permission of the third party.
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- Misrepresents any information in identifying the point of origin or the transmission path of a commercial electronic mail message.
- Contains false or misleading information in the subject line.
Each message that violates the law entitles minimum damages of $500 to individuals and $1,000 to Internet Service Providers, as long as information is available that the recipient's electronic mail address belongs to a Washington State resident. This inf orm ation must be available before the offending e-mail is sent.
If you want to be covered by this law, the Washington Association of Internet Service Providers (WAISP) has created a web page where you can register your e-mail address as belonging to a Washington State resident. The URL for this page is: http://registry.waisp.org
The Washington State Attorney General has also created a web page that can help you track down spammers and register complaints against them. For more information see: http://www.wa.gov/wwweb/AGO/junkemail
Other Recommended Resources on Spam
The Filtering Mail FAQAs the site's opening description states, "General filtering strategies and instructions for using procmail, mailagent, and the Elm filter program to filter mailing list messages into separate folders." Also has links to newsgroups dedicated to various filtering schemes.
Stop Junk EmailThis site, the home of "The Campaign to Stop Junk Email", has lots of news and information about junk e-mail, including sections on "Dealing With Junk Email (A Victim's Primer)", "Preventing Junk Email", and "Understanding Junk Email".
Figuring Out Fake E-Mail & PostsInformation on deciphering e-mail and newspost headers to track down the message's actual origin.
www.stopspam.orgLarge collection of various definition lists, guides and how-to sites. www.stopspam.org is also the new home of The Make Money Fast Myth Page, which is a sometimes tongue in check look at the flaws of Make Money Fast schemes; it also has a section called "The Detective Game", which is a very detailed example on tracking down a newspost's origin.
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