Thread: Dealing With Spammers

Following on redcardinal's post ....

If you can decipher the mail headers then you can report the spammer to either their ISP or their hosting company or both (depending on how the mails were sent)

By default most ISPs / hosts maintain abuse@ for spam reports.

If you are going to report spam please do so in a timely fashion and include samples with headers.

If the spammer is Irish you could contact the data privacy commissioner, but the reporting options are quite painful ie. you cannot simply email them and hope they will take action. You are expected to report via letter etc., which is a large burden - too much IMHO

Report spammers to DNS blacklists.
If a spammer or spammed domain gets reported and listed it can help both you and other users of DNS blacklists to block future emails from them.

You can get accounts to report spam on site such as SpamCop.net - Beware of cheap imitations and URIBL.COM - Realtime URI Blacklist

Thanks for the info and the blacklist URLs. Every day spam gets on my nerves more and more.

Originally Posted by redflystudios

Thanks for the info and the blacklist URLs. Every day spam gets on my nerves more and more.

If you outsourced your mail filtering it wouldn't

I actually have to have a chat with you about that. In Germany at the moment, but will be back on Thursday, so I'll give you a ring next week at some stage.

So what happens if I sign up using my OWN affilliate link?

Originally Posted by redflystudios

So what happens if I sign up using my OWN affilliate link?

You can't, as we don't sell it via the website

Well, don't you just have an answer for everything ;P
Is the phone the best contact method for you?

Originally Posted by redflystudios

Well, don't you just have an answer for everything ;P

I try my best

Originally Posted by redflystudios

Is the phone the best contact method for you?

If you can get past the guardians .... Email works as well though

On the subject of spam, I wonder if anyone cares to offer an opinion on the following:

Were I to put a prominant note next to my email saying that the address is not to be used for the prupose of unsolicited direct marketing and that I reserve the right to publish any email sent to this address for the purpose of direct marketing, would I be on very shaky legal ground?

I really want to look for a way to scare people (legitimate companies, Irish) off sending me spam.

Any thoughts?

Hmmm

The law in this area is very weak...

If the email address was purely personal ie. not work related then you might be able to get away with a lot of things, but if it is anyway work related the law will protect the spammer's "right" to send you one email.

The law, however, is not a reflection of the real world in all cases and ISPs can take actions against spammers that will have a much more tangible effect on them than a mere fine

Bayes filtering gets rid of 98% of all my spam after you train it for a 2 months. The program I use is popfile, popfile, POPFile - Automatic Email Classification