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On Wed, 25 Apr 2001 14:43:45 -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote
(in message <9c75t1$rcq$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>):
> If I owned a domain (which I don't) and it was being misused in this manner,
> I would do two things: Contact a lawyer about the possibility of suing the
> spammer for damages caused by his misuse of my domain, and contact local
> authorities about the possibility of bringing criminal charges of fraud or
> forgery against the spammer for falsely using your domain name.
And which of the hundreds of people doing this would you sue? And where
would you find a lawyer who would take the job on retainer? If you're a big
ISP you might be able to show enough damages to justify the cost--but I doubt
you'll get more out of a spammer than you paid in fees. Forget it if you're
a small company.
I don't know why they call it a Joe-job, I'd be very surprised if it happened
to "Joe" before it happened to somewhere.com, we were getting bogus email
bounces back in 1995 (initially due to an amusing glitch in Unix mail
programs, but the spam didn't take long to follow).
For what it's worth, here's what we did. Unfortunately some of these
solutions were more likely to work when the internet was a more trusting
place.
1. Put a prominent link on your front page explaining the situation. That
will help nip some complaints before they get sent to you, and if nothing
else, you can refer to it in #2.
2. Come up with a standard reply to complaints that explains the situation.
Explain how they can use the email headers to figure out what's going on.
3. Try very hard not to get angry at SpamCop users who just check off all the
email addresses without really looking at the recommendations. I used to
despise SpamCop. Not to mention the vigilantes who mailbomb you in
retaliation. Them, I still despise--nothing worse than a stupid vigilante.
4. Go after the spammers hard. I woke spammers up at 3:00 in the morning. I
had come-to-jesus talks with spamming ministers. I spent (and still spend) a
lot of time trying to really track down the spammer and make it real
personal. My goal was to get them angry at the people who sold them the
software, so that the people who wrote the software would change the address
defaults. As I said, this was far easier in the old days when many spammers
really didn't have a clue that they were doing something wrong.
5. Accept the fact that it will never truly be gone. Oh, you may get the
spammers to stop using the domain--I don't see spam with somewhere in the
headers more than once every few months nowadays, and almost never in the
envelope-from headers (that's where it really hurts--you haven't been
mailbombed until you get all of AOL's mail servers sending bounces at you as
fast as they can). I still have ISPs that bounce my email because they set
up a rule to bounce somewhere.com four years ago and they have no policy for
removing rules. And by the way, all those spammed messages with fake return
addresses? Now they are going to end up in some spammers list of addresses.
We bounce more than two million email messages every year (See
http://www.spamwatcher.com/tools/realtime.html for a running report.)
But hey, at least you can feel like you're fighting the good fight.
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