As I noted in an earlier post, I have gotten sick of the massive amounts of spam or UCE (unsolicited commercial email, the proper phrase) that appeared in my mailbox. I wanted to stop these people, not just attempt to filter out their messages or spend the first part of my morning using the delete key. I have found information that may be of interest to some of you.
A good source of information is the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE) website, www.cauace.org , and especially: http://www.cauce.org/about/resources.shtml Spammers are abusing the services which send out their email messages, as well, and system administrators do not appreciate having their system being turned into a mailer for someone else. Spammers attempt to cover their tracks by faking the contents of the address headers which indicate the source of a message. They can be only partially successful because mailing programs do "reverse lookups" to verify the source of a message. I have found two free programs that will go through the headers, track down the source of message, and then generate email with the appropriate warnings or complaints to system administrators. The first one is a web-based service called Spam Cop, located at http://spamcop.net/ . You register your email address at SpamCop and the program generates a unique ID for you. Your spam complaints are passed through the SpamCop program and are tagged with that ID so you do not have to worry about revenge against your email address. The second one is a Windows program called "Spam Punisher" and it may be found at http://biosolutions.hypermart.net/ . It works in a similar fashion but is keyed to pull in a message from HotMail, MS Outlook, Netscape, or The Bat (??). Otherwise you must cut-and-paste your message into the analysis window. I don't use any of those mailers so I chose to use Spam Cop. Ken ---------------------- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dept. of Psychology Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
