One particularly odious breed of internet scammer plays on the desires of lonely single men for female companionship (and the targets of this scam are always men — I seldom see similar mail from nice young men reaching out to random women). Like other “one-on-one” scams (and unlike most conventional “selling-stuff” spam), these frauds require close and continued contact via e-mail. And so, one way of fighting back is to attempt to have the scammer’s incoming e-mail blocked. Some of these scammers don’t make it easy for us; this page describes how to locate their mail hosts and file appropriate abuse reports on them.
(more…)
“Where does a spam message come from?”
This question seems as though it ought to be easy to answer, and it can be, but it is a rather vague question, and many people aren’t sure what they mean when they ask it. A good first step in understanding the problem of unsolicited bulk e-mail is to come to grips with this question, and fortunately this does not require a great deal of technical expertise — you need only draw on a far more familiar communications medium that you probably already understand.
Autoresponders are software “robots” that, er, automatically respond to incoming e-mail messages. They are the engines that power a number of popular enhancements to e-mail service. Under normal circumstances, autoresponders work well and cause no one any substantial grief; when spam mail enters the picture, however, autoresponders can go “rampant” (like the robot villains in video games) and send out tons of irrelevant mail to total strangers. If you use (or plan to use) an autoresponder-based feature in your e-mail setup, you should be aware of these problems and make appropriate allowances.
(more…)
Wouldn’t it be great if you could somehow make yourself invisible to spammers by tricking them (and only them) into thinking that your e-mail address doesn’t work? A few well-known e-mail programs and add-on utilities claim to be able to do just that: they offer “bounce” features that let you selectively send official-looking bounce replies to messages you get; the idea is that these “pretend bounces“ (as I will call them) are supposed to convince the recipients that your address is undeliverable, and thereby discourage them from bothering you further.
Is it really this simple? Does this technique actually work, and can you use it both ethically and safely? Based on some research, and some testing of my own, I have to conclude that the answer to all these questions may be NO. Pretend bounces are completely ineffective in just those cases where you could most benefit from them (i.e., against hardcore criminal spammers). In addition, pretend bounces can be misdirected to innocent parties who were not involved in the spamming (making the pretend bounce itself a form of reportable e-mail abuse), and they may also show evidence of manipulation and deception that can cause them to be tagged as abusive e-mail by many e-mail systems. Read on for the details.
Why do spammers send out their appeals via e-mail? Principally because it is very cheap for them. Why is it so cheap? Although bulk e-mail is not a particularly efficient medium for mass advertising (at least, not from a communications-theory point of view, as we will see), our current e-mail environment is set up so that the costs for its inefficiency tend to be shifted away from the sender and onto the recipients. So, although you may be angry about the sociopathic or criminal content of spam, or the need to spend your time and resources in order to deal with it, you are far more entitled to be angry about the fact that you pay for it. In this post, we’ll take a look at why this is true.
