Open Letter to a Spam Reporter
Hi. I've received a large volume of complaints from yourself this morning mis-addressed to postmaster@[domain].com. Whilst an address at [domain].net is listed as registrant for the spamvertised domain, the .com and .net domains are unrelated.
A word of advice: it's unlikely that the spammers themselves will remove you from their lists or take any kind of action no matter what volume of complaints they receive. On the other hand, if your complaints do reach people who are willing and able to deal with spam problems, filling their mailboxes with megabytes of spammed or misdirected complaints is perhaps not the best way to get their assistance. A single, polite message would be much more effective.
And believe me, those of us who work in the technical departments of reputable internet companies want to get rid of the spam problem even more than our end users do - dealing with it costs us a vast amount of time, money and aggravation. For example, my spam filters only block out around 95% of the ten thousand or so junk messages I receive daily, and I had to drop everything else for the latter half of this week to deal with a series of spam attacks against our email servers.
Unfortunately, spam is a fact of life on the Internet at present, and the only thing that will stop it is a concerted world-wide technological and legal effort. If you really want to help in the fight, the best thing you can do is lobby your political representatives for tough restrictions on junk email, and harsher penalties for offenders.
A word of advice: it's unlikely that the spammers themselves will remove you from their lists or take any kind of action no matter what volume of complaints they receive. On the other hand, if your complaints do reach people who are willing and able to deal with spam problems, filling their mailboxes with megabytes of spammed or misdirected complaints is perhaps not the best way to get their assistance. A single, polite message would be much more effective.
And believe me, those of us who work in the technical departments of reputable internet companies want to get rid of the spam problem even more than our end users do - dealing with it costs us a vast amount of time, money and aggravation. For example, my spam filters only block out around 95% of the ten thousand or so junk messages I receive daily, and I had to drop everything else for the latter half of this week to deal with a series of spam attacks against our email servers.
Unfortunately, spam is a fact of life on the Internet at present, and the only thing that will stop it is a concerted world-wide technological and legal effort. If you really want to help in the fight, the best thing you can do is lobby your political representatives for tough restrictions on junk email, and harsher penalties for offenders.
