Fighting Junk Email and Spam
The principle effective way to handle unpleasant emails is to worry the sender
as he does you.
If many of his receivers act like you, he loses so much time, resources and money,
that he will withdraw such activities as soon as possible.
For the first time you should write him a short email back, complaining that he should not email you with his junk email.
Whether this is junk or not, this is no a point, because it was intended for you, so clearly you decide this fact.
The main effort is to get the correct address for send-back.
Mostly these (commercial,junk,unpleasent,annoying) emails have a fake From-field and/or a fake In-Reply-To-field.
Because they don't like to get back response for each email which they send!
How to decipher who send you really the junk email.
Be sure to have the right address to complain!.
For mail from com, edu, gov, net, and org -Toplevel-Domains look at the
WhoIs-Service of the Top-Level US-American Domain-Name-Server for the addresses of the persons who are responsable.
An automatic lookup formular for host/domain-names by authorized name servers.
Fill in your hostname or domainname of the emailaddress (not the total emailaddress) you like to resolve, select the resource record typ
ANY and click on the buttons for Authority Information and Additional Information. The answer you will get back is one or more full qualifyed hostaddress(es).
To one of these addresses listed there, you should always can mail to the postmaster to complain you spam-problem!
Here is an examplaric header of such an annoying email:
From sales@usa.net Sat Jul 19 23:25:24 MES 1997
Received: from core.atmnet.net by hermes.hrz.uni-bielefeld.de with ESMTP
(1.37.109.17/16.2) id AA236537521; Sat, 19 Jul 1997 23:25:22 +0200
Return-Path:
Received: from mail.atmnet.net (max-ppp1-33.theone.net [207.137.134.33]) by core.atmnet.net (8.8.5/8.6.9) with SMTP id OAA17861; Sat, 19 Jul 1997 14:01:48 -0700 (PDT)
From: sales@usa.net
Received: from mailhost.cprvid.com (alt1.cprvid.com (208.9.77.65)) by cprvid.com (8.8.5/8.6.5) with SMTP id GAA08840 for ; Sat, 19 Jul 1997 13:54:58 -0600 (EST)
Date: Sat, 19 Jul 97 13:54:58 EST
To: sales@cprvid.com
Subject: MEDICAL MARIJUANA BUTTER
Message-Id: <199702170025.GAA08056@cprvid.com>
Reply-To: sales@cprvid.com
X-Pmflags: 34078848 0
X-Uidl: 2610431056a78aeb1b128fda426c9a5e
Comments: Authenticated sender is
Status: O
SELF EXPLANATORY MESSAGE!
1.4oz JAR of MEDICAL MARIJUANA BUTTER
and two recipies.
Send $35.00 check or money order to:
The 'Reply-To:'-field and the 'To:-field are set to a non existing host address by the sender. Also
a 'From:'-field would not be authentic, because it can also be set by the
sender. And the 'Comments:'-field entry is simple ridiculous for our purpose.
Therefore, we look at the very first line in this mail header: 'From sales@usa.net ...' this looks like a correct address. Therefore we will reply to this address.
In this case, after some seconds we get back a Mail-Delivery-Error: user unknown.
Similar, if getting similar errors as Service unavailable, Mailer configuration error or other Mail-Delivery-Errors,
we will bounce the obtained Mail-Delivery-Error Email to postmaster@usa.net to indicate that we got insulting email from his domain. If it doesn't matter him --- it should ---
it is highly probable, that he collaborates with the original sender, maybe he
or his company sold them the internet address. Then complain to him as you like to the original sender. It's like someone make a traffic jam with a lended car, but the renting company says:
"it's not my problem, try to find the driver". It will become there problem for sure by law!
Tit for Tat
The important point is: This can happen to him by everyone else who also
complained for getting annoyed by such email. Therefore initiator suffers a multiple loss
of time and resources! And if only many receivers of his original email
acts like you, the best what he can do is to give up his connectivity for a while. This is a much too high price to pay for commercail advertisments and
they will probable withdraw such junk emails.
The best thing he can do is to delete all incoming mail.
The best thing you should do in case of repeatation:
Put his address into your black list and
response automatically your "receive denied from this address" back to the
postmaster.
Then he has a chance to notice that his email doesn't make much money to him
or even costs him more than he gets from his customers.
If he persist with such messages, maybe he is paid by a company, which gets
much mony by rending WEB-pages to commercials, discreditize the company in public.
This can simple be done by puting it onto special black lists.
More Information availible at
Black humor and Reality
Black sheeps never die out ---
and the silly ones will always be in the majority,
... but in most cases, you are in this last class. :->
Achim Flammenkamp
1997-10-17 13:30 UT+1