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Spam solutions
Spam emails are at least an unecessary annoyance. Although there are many anti spam programs about, and some actually work, your time is still needed to check in case a desired message has ended up there.
Another option is to have email via a contact form on your websites as, unlike the links that bring up your email program, they hide your email address from spammers. This however, only reduces the amount of spam you get. If like me you would rather fight back, there is something much more pro-active you can do that actually makes life difficult for these parasites.
Reporting Spammers
It is quite easy to report spammers if you know what to do. There are a few steps which are outlined here:
- Find where the spam has been sent from
- Get the 'report abuse' email address of their ISP (or network provider)
- Send a copy of the message complete with headers
Emails have at least two parts to them: the headers and the message body. This webpage has information about how to view the message headers, but in Microsoft Outlook you open the message and click 'View' -> 'options'. At the bottom of the dialogue box is a little text box, like this:
Click in that dialogue text box then copy and paste into a word processor document. I use Wordpad or Notepad, as these don't mess about with the fonts etc. You then copy and paste into the new document the main body of the message immediately after the headers.
Near the start of the headers you will see where the message actually originated from, that is, the real sender's IP address and not the 'return path' which is probably some innocent person. Here is a screen shot that shows what this looks like in the headers.
The IP address is the series of numbers within the square brackets. Now you can use that to find their ISP or network provider.
Copy and paste the IP address into the first text box in this webpage and hit the 'Lookup' button like this:
Look for information such as: 'report-abuse: abuse@their_isp.com' or in some cases where that's not listed, use the webpage of their ISP to send them the details. Of couse if their ISP's website is not shown you should at least be able to ascertain who they are and find them via a search engine, such as Google. You can also report them by sending the above info to your own ISP.
That's it! You're a spam-warrior!