"Candy" or Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (UCE)

[Margaret Schimmels <megschimme@FEIST.COM>]

        Fighting unwanted and unsolicited e-mail is something I kind of enjoy
doing :-).  It feels great to get some of these creeps kicked off their
services.  I used to just hit the delete key but I have received so many
obnoxious and obscene mailings that I decided to fight back.

        Get yourself educated first and learn how to read e-mail headers.  Some of
my favorite sites for learning how to decipher headings are listed here.  I
use Eudora, so when I hit the "Blah Blah" key (really, that's what it's
called) the full headers appear.  It's too detailed to decribe here how to
read the headers, and it depends somewhat on the type of mail program you
use, but it is *very* important that you learn how to do this correctly
before you go trying to make a complaint. Basically you file the complaint
to abuse@XXX.XXX at the first place the mail was injected into the system.
You read headers from the bottom up, not the top down. Once you learn how
to figure out who injected the UCE into the system, then you can do a trace
and find out what the real domain name is of the provider, where you will
file your complaint.

Anti-Spam Campaign/ Reporting Spammers
http://www.ao.net/waytosuccess/reportspam.html

How to Complain About Spam, or Putting a Spammer in the Slammer
http://weber.ucsd.edu/~pagre/spam.html

Reading E-Mail Headers
http://www.stopspam.org/email/headers/headers.html

E-Mail Abuse FAQ
http://members.aol.com/emailfaq/emailfaq.html

ConsumerNet Traceroute
http://consumer.net/tracert3/

        There is a nifty auto-generated spam complaint website called Nail 'Em
that you use to copy and paste the entire UCE, headers and all, and it will
figure out for you where to send the complaint.  It *usually* works pretty
well, sometimes it's not as good as you would be once you get the hang of
it.  It does have a very polite but firm letter form you can use to copy
and paste into your e-mail program to send off to the internet provider,
who may or may not be aware what the offender is up to.  I really like
their complaint form letter.  I use this service as a first approach.  If
Nail 'Em can't figure who sent the UCE, then I do it myself using
tracerroute, especially the service provided on ConsumerNet
http://consumer.net/tracert3/.

Nail 'Em
http://www.minivend.com/cgi-bin/nailem.html






Regards,

Margaret Schimmels
Library Media Specialist
Harry Street Elementary
Wichita (KS) Public Schools
megschimme@feist.com

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