published in the Dallas/Fort Worth Unix User's Group newsletter, January 1997. Copyright 1997 Danny Faught.
"I am sending you this message because I want to give you a FREE GIFT!!"
"Turn a $20 investment into $95,000"
"Make money giving away free laptop computers."
Do any of these sound familiar? If so, then maybe you've also been the victim of unsolicited email advertising. The term "spam", originally used (in this context) mostly to refer to Usenet postings of a similar ilk, now is also used to refer to this sort of junk email. I classify it right along with phone solicitations on my list of annoying things that interrupt my work day for no good reason. Actually, I'd say it's worse, for a number of reasons. For one, I use email more than I use the phone. When some idiot drops an advertisement in my email box, it interrupts one of the most important tools that I use to get my job done. Consider also that these guys are probably paying a flat rate for their Internet access, but some people do pay for each message that they receive. Imagine someone calling you collect in order to try to sell you something!
We all probably consider advertising a necessary part of life to some extent. We tolerate commercials on television because they help make the programming cheap or free for us to watch. We tolerate ads on web sites when they allow us to access some sort of free service. But what service does email advertising give to society? I have yet to think of a single positive aspect, at least from the recipients' point of view.
Some email spam includes instructions for getting off of the distribution list. But often the instructions don't work. And the spam usually doesn't indicate which address they used. There are at least half a dozen addresses for me that will all get to the same mailbox, so I don't know what to ask them to remove. I find it more effective to try to shut down the whole operation.
What I do each time I get email spam is to send a complaint back to the sender and the sender's postmaster. I explain clearly that I don't tolerate email spam and I politely ask the postmaster ensure that it doesn't happen again. Unfortunately, figuring out who to complain to sometimes takes a lot of sleuthing. If all the headers in the message point to one place, then it's likely that the spammer didn't attempt to forge the message. But if there are several domains implicated in the message, or there are a dozen or fewer header lines (meaning the header was probably completely fabricated from scratch), it's going to take more work. When in doubt, I send my complaint to several of the likely sites that could have originated the spam. If all of us complained loudly instead of accepting spam as a fact of life, perhaps the spammers will get the message.
Sometimes you run into a gray area. I recently got an email advertisement from a company that I did have a relationship with, but I still complained because I had no interest whatsoever in the whole product category they were pushing. This time I complained to the company president rather than the postmaster. It turned out that they sent the advertisement to a mailing list for one of their newsletters, but they didn't explain that in the advertisement. I convinced them to make it more clear to their subscribers that they were going to send them advertisements.
There are many people on the net who are putting a lot of energy into fighting spam. Some good places to start looking for more information are the "Fight spam on the Internet!" pages at http://www.vix.com/spam/ and the alt.spam FAQ at http://digital.net/~gandalf/spamfaq.html.
copyright 1996, Danny Faught faught@asqnet.org