Re: EdShop

["Steve Crutchfield" SCRUTCH@xxxxxxxx]

Pardon my cynicism here, but my personal experience with trying to
battle spam is like teaching a pig to sing: you don't get very good
music, and you just annoy the pig.

As a long time member of AOL, I'm used to getting zillions of "click
here for XXX porn" or "Click here to will $ zillions in FREE MONEY!" I
used to complain, now I just lean on the delete key. It saves time,
energy, and keeps my blood pressure within reasonable limits.

Also: I understand that replying to the "Reply here to remove me from
your list" is actually counter productive - it merely confirms to the
Spammer that "she/he/it" (pronounced as one would expect!) has reached
a live person, which prompts "she/he/it" to sell your email address to
other spammers.

My rule of thumb: if I don't know the sender, if I don't recognize the
subject matter, I just delete it unread.

Steve Crutchfield

P.S. - I ***WAS*** going to say that battling Spam is about as
productive as hoping for a Smart Words beta to be released, but I
refrained.


≪< Peter Evans  11/19 9:16p ≫>
Richard Henderson:

>Would you care to suggest the proper text for complaining to
Media3.net?

How about:

  whois shows that edshop.com is hosted by you. If this is
  so, you may like to know that these people are spammers.
  They spammed the XyWrite mailing list, of which I am a
  member. The polite and legalistic and "sincere" mumbo-
  jumbo at the top and bottom merely shows that edshop.com
  is the more polite kind of spammer. (Presumably they
  backdated the message by five days in order that
  http://spamcop.net/ would reject it as "too old" and thus
  refuse to "chomp" the message header and identify the ISP
  that edshop used.)

  Spam follows:

Followed of course by the spam.

That's rather more detailed than what I wrote myself. The key points
are:
Append the complete message, with all the headers. Be polite, and
don't
make any threat. Don't use any address you value in order to send the
mail, on the off-chance that the person who reads your message might
forward it to the spammer. (I use my junky hotmail address for this
kind
of thing.)

Your question is good and if my reply is helpful I'm glad to be of
help.
But I hesitate: at least one friend (and subscriber to this list) says
that
he seldom gets spam and indeed for every such pink item he gets five
or
more messages about it -- so he's much more tired of messages such as
this
than he is of spam itself. That's not the only good reason not to let
this
develop into a major thread. Instead, look at http://spamcop.net/ and
http://www.samspade.org/ and the links therefrom; almost everything is
explained there; sometimes in rather more length and detail than one
wants,
but sometimes hilariously.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Peter Evans