Dealing With SPAM

What You Should Do

Forward spam messages, with full message headers, to

What You Shouldn't Do

Don't reply to e-mail addresses promising to remove you from spammer's lists. And don't visit web sites that claim to remove you from them either. Do you keep sending back "removes" to spammers, keep adding your address to "global spam remove" web sites, but yet your spam volume only seems to be wildly increasing? Here's why:

http://www.spamhaus.org/removelists.html

Reporting Spam

To report spam to anyone, be sure to include the full headers on the e-mail message. This tells administrators a lot about of what they need to know about an e-mail's origin, etc. Follow the instructions at this website:

http://micro.uoregon.edu/fullheaders/

Spam Is Unsolicited E-Mail

SPAM is a annoyance but now there are certain recources we can use to prevent and at least begin to block some of it. A good clearinghouse of general SPAM information can be found here:

http://spam.abuse.net/

The California State Law attempts to provide civil penalties for spam. See:

California Code 17538.4 and 17538.45

Our current e-mail system has in place some blocks of user reported SPAM senders. The block list is currently too long to continue listing. In addition, our e-mail server does NOT accept any e-mail from a domain name that does not exist. While that does not necessarily block most spammers, it does block some low-level spammers. The other major method is at the user level with filters controlling your delivered e-mail. Procmail is an excelent tool for this. I will be writing up Procmail use shortly.

I Want To Know More

A good compendium of information is available at: http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/E-mail/Spam/Preventing/