How to be a spammer's worst nightmare.

[johnperna]

How to be a spammer's worst nightmare.

The law requires that spammers provide an "unsubscribe" function,

on all of their outgoing spam.

Many people are afraid to use the "unsubscribe" function on the spam,

because they know that spammers may sell their email address,

once it is VERIFIED as being a valid email address.

The theory is that your act of "unsubscribing" VERIFIES your email address,

as being a valid email address.

Some spammers give an "unsubscribe" address,

to send a blank email, but that address BOUNCES.

SOLUTION:

This takes time, but so does putting up with spam.

Make a "spammer fighting document" of BOUNCING email addresses,

and save it in your drafts folder.

Save all of the spammers addresses in that document,

including those that are not bouncing,

and including any other addresses that ARE BOUNCING.

Go ahead and use the "unsubscribe" URL to "unsubscribe" your own address.

Then "unsubscribe" all of the other addresses in your spammer fighting document.

Be sure to "unsubscribe" some contact addresses for the scam artists.

You can usually use the "back" button to repeatedly "unsubscribe" addresses.

If the spammer sells this list of email addresses,

he will cause other spammers to spam EACH OTHER,

AND to send a lot of spam to BOUNCING email addresses,

and scam artists.

This will only have an effect if the spammer DOES SELL this email list.

Massive application of this procedure will make the practice of selling

"verified" email addresses impossible.

If the spammer requires you to enter your name on the "unsubscribe" URL,

enter HIS NAME INSTEAD.

Then you will be able to prove that he sold you address.

Some spammers join egroups,

and then spam all of the members of the group, at once.

Report these spammers to the moderators of the groups,

AND ALSO report these spammers to the server;

which provides the egroup.

Some egroup servers have a "report spam" button.

Report these spammers to their OWN ISP,

and ask them to block this sender.

Report these spammers to YOUR OWN ISP,

and ask them to block this sender,

or TO BLOCK THEIR ENTIRE ISP.

Some spammers send news letters to egroups.

Those who publish news letters should build their own subscriber base,

made up of people who have "opted in" to their OWN news letters;

not simply subscribed to a different forum.

These news letters might include instructions such as:

"To be removed from future mailings just reply with REMOVE in the subject

line. THIS DOES NOT APPLY IN YAHOO GROUPS! CHANGE YOUR EMAIL SETTINGS OR

UNSUBSCRIBE!!"

Spammers pretend to be complying with anti-spam laws by giving directions for

UNSUBSCRIBING.

Yet what those directions ACTUALLY SAY,

is that if you are in a Yahoo group, then you CANNOT UNSUBSCRIBE,

unless you UNSUBSCRIBE from the group.

Spammers assert that once they join a group, and begin to flood that

group with spam,

that no one has a right to be in that group except those who will put up

with this spam.

Spammers force people to accept these news letter,

by sending them to yahoogroups.

To unsubscribe from this spam a group moderator must ban the spammer, and he must also ban all of his aliases.

This must be done in every group, where he is spamming.

There are usually multiple aliases.

Some groups are unmoderated, and there is no one to assert this kind of control.

Even if a moderator bans all of these aliases the spammer

will often create a new alias, and re-subscribe.

Yahoo regularly deletes his ID's for this kind of abuse, but he just creates another ID,

and goes back to the same abuse.

[Wazoo]

Moved from "Reporting" to the Lounge.

Must note the lack of any cautionary note that the e-mail addresses involved in the above scenarios may not actually / all belong to (or have been created by) the spammer. With the teaming up of spammers and virus/trojan authors, it's hard to trust a lot of things these days.

[agsteele]

Although I'm sure johnperna's intentions are those many would agree with, I can't help but think that the idea is more likely to inconvenience a whole bunch of innocent bystanders and, as Wazoo suggests, create traffic to loads of forged mailbox addresses - many non-existent.

As far as I can see, this isn't a sensible approach.

Andrew

[Miss Betsy]

Some spammers join egroups,

and then spam all of the members of the group, at once.

Report these spammers to the moderators of the groups,

AND ALSO report these spammers to the server;

which provides the egroup.

Some egroup servers have a "report spam" button.

Report these spammers to their OWN ISP,

and ask them to block this sender.

Report these spammers to YOUR OWN ISP,

and ask them to block this sender,

or TO BLOCK THEIR ENTIRE ISP.

While I agree that playing around with an 'unsubscribe' is not wise, he does have some good advice here.

The more people who report to ISPs about spam, the more likely something will be done.

Miss Betsy