Hi, The following two links went out on my list yesterday that I thought may be of interest to people curious about spam: Spam feeding anger on Internet (w/some tips on how to handle email) http://www.chicagotribune.com/technology/chi-0201070115jan07.story?coll=chi%... Essays on junk email http://www.templetons.com/brad/spume/ Yes, I think Michel Menou is right, responding to spam can only worsen the situation because you confirm that yours is an active account. (This is relevant because spammers often just generate email addresses hoping they work (suzyq@hotmail.com, suzyq@yahoo.com) and if you respond they'll know it worked.) I'll try restating Valdis' suggestion for tracking down spam, although I do believe it would take a full time job to respond to all messages. Here's an example from a spam message header:
Received: from dougfir([128.32.179.166]) by btamail.net.cn(JetMail 2.5.3.0) with SMTP id jm213c392c2e; Mon, 7 Jan 2002 05:00:37 -0000 X-Mailer: FoxMail 3.5 Release [cn]
It looks like the message is from China (.cn), but if you put 128.32.179.166 into a reverse IP lookup engine, you'll soon find out that the message travelled via a server at Berkeley. I figured that was worth pursuing. So I sent a note to abuse@berkeley.edu with that part of the header. (As extra precaution, I don't send the whole header that includes my email address that was spammed and I send the abuse note from my Yahoo account.) Within a day I had gotten two follow-ups. It turned out that the machine had a worm which led to the problems and they fixed it. Of course, the spammers will find other avenues to your mailbox, but it seems that this could be a small step to clean things up, and if more people followed up on it... but then again, who has time... Eszter --- Eszter's List: http://www.eszter.com/elist