Anti-Spam Attack

People do all sorts of things in an effort to actively combat spammers. Some of them should be avoided. Others should only be pursued by experienced users. None of them will immediately stop junk email from getting in your inbox.

Legitimate reporting of spam to ISPs is a reasonably good idea. It's however critical to have all your facts straight. Anyone who's familiar with the SMTP protocol can fairly easily forge certain portions of the headers, and make it look like an innocent party is at fault for sending the unwanted e-mails.

Some spam filter software applications advertise the ability to "take revenge" against spammers. To do so they send automated complaints to their service providers. This is a royally bad idea for the reason mentioned above. A more benign approach only sends "bounce" emails back to the sender. The hope is that the spammer will think your email address is invalid and remove you from their list. Sounds good, but this usually doesn't help in reality.

I've even had a user asking if SpamButcher can be configured to automatically bomb spammers' inboxes with thousands of junk messages. Turn about may seem like fair play, but this activity may in reality be illegal. Think twice before trying to take revenge. The most likely result of this kind of stunt is having to change service providers.

Another common prank is to call a spammer's 1-800 number and be abusive toward whoever answers. This may seem tempting, however consider that the person on the other end of the phone is probably not directly connected to the spam. Deploying an inexpensive spam blocker application is a more effective approach to the problem.

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