Sam gave a very good reason why not to write spammers, and why to
contact ISPs [if you can get a decent address from Whois].
On Sun, 29 Oct 2000 21:01:54 -0500, Samuel W. Heywood wrote:
> Spammers use a tactic known as "recon by fire" in order to hunt for
> targets. When they fire on a location from which they receive return fire
> then they have a fix on the hapless victim's position. Then they can
> bring their big guns on line and key in the target's coordinates and
> deliver a heavy barrage to blow the target away.
However, the rule I was once taught to follow -- send a message of
complaint to [EMAIL PROTECTED] is not a risky thing at best.
I sent such a message once. I suddenly started receiving abuse messages
addressed to that domain but sent to me! And then messages complaining
to others about complaining to them and not to abuse etc etc etc.
The original spammer had set up a bot at the ABUSE mailbox; every
message that came in was forwarded to a random number of e-dresses, said
e-dresses having been culled from incoming messages to ABUSE. IOW, if
you complained about spam, you were likely to start receiving other's
complaints about spam and *also* others messages to others about spam --
because there was a cc hidden in the headers that didn't show up when
you were responding ... so if you sent a response to a 3rd party that
had been routed through the Abuse mailbox, you also sent a cc to the
abuse mailbox. Can you see how horrid that could turn out???
I got lucky. I managed to find a *wayyyyyyyy* upstream provider
address, and advised them of what was happening. I don't know if the
spammer and domain went down, but I stopped getting forwarded messages.
Moral of this story: Certain cretins will always find a way to mess you
over, no matter how closely you follow the safety rules.
l.d.
--
Join B'FOR - B'mothers For Open Records
<a href="http://www.b-for.org">B'FOR web site</A>
[Associate members of triad also welcome; membership confidential.]
Every member counts! We need numbers to produce valid statistics.
*******
A proud member of
<A HREF="http://www.phenomenalwomen.com/"> Phenomenal Women Of The Web</a>
-- Arachne V1.67, NON-COMMERCIAL copy, http://arachne.cz/
