Unsolicited Commercial Email: "Spam"

Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE), or "spam," is email sent for the purposes of advertising a product or service without the consent of the recipient. "Spammers" compile lists of email addresses that they have culled from posts to Usenet newsgroups, Internet mailing lists, or just by searching the Web, and send a single message to everyone on their list. The most common types of spam advertize get rich quick schemes, products of dubious quality, and web sites dedicated to pornography. Usually, the spammer will substitute a fake email address for their own, forge other header fields in the email, and place their list of addresses in the Bcc: (Blind carbon copy) field so that it is not visible to the recipients.

So how is this different from the paper "junk" mail we're all used to receiving? You just throw it out and have done with it, right?

Spam works a little differently. With snail-mail (i.e., the kind you get from the US Post Office), the person sending the mail bears the burden of the costs of its delivery (postage). Email is maintained and paid for by the recipient. You pay for your account, for disk space, and for connection time. Spam takes up space and takes time for you to download. You bear the burden of paying for mail that you did not request.

Sending UCE, or "spamming" as we savvy netizens call it, is strictly prohibited by EsisNet's Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). Such activity will result in the termination of the offending account. Nonetheless, despite our anti-spam policies, EsisNet will not block mail from any domains, be they known spam domains or not. We do not believe in filtering or censoring our customers' email.

If you need even more reasons to get your dander up about spam, take a look at spam.abuse.net. This site contains a wealth of information about spam and efforts to curtail it.

What can I do about Spam?

There isn't much you can do about the spammers themselves, but there are some measures you can take to keep spam from filling up your mailbox.

• Be careful with your email address. Spammers have a variety of tools at their disposal that can cull email addresses from Usenet postings and Web pages. Keep in mind that not every form or guestbook you fill out on the web will keep the information you submit private. Also, when posting on Usenet, it can be useful to have your email address in a "coded" form, such as johnNOSPAM@esisnet.com or mary"at"esisnet"dot"com, with instructions for "decoding" in your signature, e.g., "Remove NOSPAM to reply."
• Never reply to spam! Many spam mailings will give you the option to get off their list by replying to the message with the word "remove" in your subject or some other such nonsense. Think about it; why should you have to ask to be removed from a list you never asked to join? This is usually just a way for the spammer to confirm that yours is a valid address, and then you just end up getting more spam!
• Use email filtering software. A number of email clients, such as Eudora Pro, Pegasus Mail, and Agent, allow you to filter mail from specific domains, or mail not addressed specifically to you, into different directories. This way you can weed out the spam from your real mail. There are also some anti-spam software products that auto-reply with cautionary messages (e.g., "Leave me alone or I'll sue!"). As stated above, this is generally a bad idea, doing you more harm than good.
• The Spam Bouncer.You can find a "spam-bouncing" procmail recipe here.
• Notify the spammer's ISP. You can learn to decipher email headers here. You can then send email to postmaster@ or abuse@ the isp in question. Spamming is against the Acceptable Use Policies (AUP) of most ISPs, and conseuqently, will often get their account terminated once brought to their ISP's attention.

  For more useful information on combatting Spam, take a look at Help! I've been spammed! What do I do? A Guide for the Beginner.