Tips, Tricks, and Other Useful Information

Tip #1:  Spam
At some point everybody will probably receive Unsolicited Commercial Email commonly known as spam.  It comes in many different forms.  Sometimes it even includes a reference to a House Bill and claims to be legal or that it is not spam because it includes instructions to remove your name from the mailing list.

I have personally recieved messages with the following text:

In accordance with Bill S.1618 Title III passed by the 105th U. S. Congress, this letter can not be considered spam as long as we include: (1) Contact information and (2) a way to be removed from future mailings. To remove yourself email us at remove@somebogusdomain.com and type “Remove” in the “subject” line.
There is apparently another version of the text as follows:
Under the provisions of U. S. Bill S. 1618 Title III, this letter is not spam and no further action can be taken by the reader against this company/person. Any report of this letter as spam to any independent agency or site is a violation of this law and will be dealt with promptly.
These two statements were copied from http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h/tek1/spam_and_law.htm.

A brief search at http://www.google.com for ["house bill" 1618] reveals several pages indicating that the information regarding the bill is false.  According to the site of the Tech Law Journal at http://www.techlawjournal.com/congress/slamspam/s1618es.htm this bill never became law.

There are many reasons that contacting a spammer is a bad idea:

1.  It confirms that you use the  email address in question, therefore they may send more spam, or sell your address to other spammers.
2.  Many times spammers falsify the return information, therefore you may be inadvertently contributing to deluging an innocent person's account with replies meant for the spammer.
3.  Depending on the spammer, they may decide to redirect all of their replies to your account.

What should we do about spam?

1.  Find out if your ISP has a policy regarding incoming spam.  If they do, they may want you to forward a copy of the message with full internet headers to an internal account so they can investigate it.
2.  If the message appears to come from an authentic Internet Service Provider (AOL, MSN, AT&T, Yahoo, etc.) send a copy with full headers  to abuse@provider.  You may need to check the web site of the provider to determine the exact address.

If you need to display the full headers, you should