Junk Mail (was i want freedom)

[Tom Rettie <tom@his.com>]

Poster: Tom Rettie <tom@his.com>

At 04:06 PM 4/29/97 -0400, LORNABAKER@aol.com wrote:

>How can I excape the computerized version of the telemarketer. My e-mail box
>gets filled with junk mail. While friends of mine get their e-mail bounced,
>because my e-mail box is full of stuff I don't want, didn't ask for, have no
>desire to see, etc. Please tell me what to do to get these people to stay out
>of my e-mail .

Unfortunately, there isn't a lot you can do.  Let me guess, it's stuff from
domains like Cyberpromo.com, Savetrees.com, and Hotmail.com?  Much of this
stuff originates (or gets passed through) an outfit called Cyber Promotions,
the owner of which thinks that spam (or Unsolicited Commercial Email, UCE)
is just the greatest thing on earth.  There are a bunch of other spam
factories as well.

AOL seems to take this stuff seriously, so you can start by sending copies
of your unwanted junk to ABUSE@AOL.COM (assuming you got it on AOL) and ask
them if they can block the sender's domain.  This works in some, but not all
instances.  You can try to complain directly to the sender's Internet
Service Provider, but often the real identity is so masked that you can't
tell, or the sender's ISP doesn't care.  You also have to be careful in
replying to spam, esp. with "REMOVE" requests, because sometimes those
remove requests are used as proof that you're a legit address and you just
get more spam.

For the rest of the good folks on this mailing list, I'll add that you too
may end up with this problem.  If you subscribe to a mailing list, even if
you never post to it, spammers can get your email address from the
listserver and add it to their own insidious list.  I run a small mailing
list, and I'm sure it's been used a couple of times by spammers who wanted
to target scuba divers.  Unfortunately, most spammers aren't discriminating
and will take ANY addresses they can find -- from web pages, mail archives,
newsgroups, etc., etc.

Good luck.  

Tom R.


------------------------------------------------------------
Tom Rettie                                       tom@his.com
Heather Bryden                               bryden@hers.com
------------------------------------------------------------

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