Reporting Spam

When you receive a spam email from someone who's never sent you one before then, unless you do something to make it otherwise, you have entered into a relationship that will last until one of the following happens

The spammer dies in a fire that destroys his computer and mailing list
OR
You die

This relationship will involve the spammer sending you anything up to 20 useless emails every day for the rest of his life or yours.

You will probably think in terms of how many spam emails you receive per day but it would more accurate to think of how many you receive per hour. Spammers don't seem to sleep; they just keep pumping out spam round the clock. So what can you do about it? Don't bother to try replying to the email with a complaint - spammers forge the headers so the return address won't be genuine. So you're left with a choice of the following.

Spam Filtering

This is an option that many people go for and it's effective. But it doesn't actually tackle the problem. It generally stops you having to look at the spam but it doesn't stop the spammer sending it to you. And why should you have to go to the trouble and expense of installing a spam filter and waste time monitoring it?
As well as this, filtering, in one way at least, makes the problem worse. In their efforts to dodge filters, spammers bulk out their emails with nonsense text or embedded graphics to dilute the factors that filters detect and this results in spam becoming bulkier, using up more bandwidth and taking longer to download. As well as this they send out a greater bulk of spam in the hope that some will get through filters.

Greylisting

The name greylisting comes about because it falls somewhere between whitelisting (maintaining a list of senders that you allow to deliver to you) and blacklisting (maintaining a list of senders that you block). With greylisting your mailserver checks three pieces of information on an incoming email.

The IP address of the host attempting the delivery
The envelope sender address
The envelope recipient address

These three pieces of information form a unique relationship called a triplet and if the mailserver has never encountered this triplet before it temporarly rejects the email (please resend later). If the mailserver has encountered the triplet before it accepts the email.
If the temporarily rejected email is resent then the mailserver accepts the email and adds its triplet to a database and will accept any email with a triplet already in its database. The concept relies on the fact that temporary failures are built into the RFC specifications and that a legitimate mailserver will attempt to resend the email at a later time - whereas many spamming tools will not retry a failed delivery therefore the spam is never delivered.
The advantage with greylisting is that it is simple to operate and will dramatically reduce spam. The disadvantage is that it removes the instantaneous nature of email because of the delay when a new triplet is encountered. It may also result in email not being delivered - such as when the source of an e-mail is a server farm or goes through an anti-spam mail relay service it is likely that a server other than the original server will retry and will therefore fail again.
Despite the criticisms we've found that greylisting works well and is available as standard on our hosting packages (it can be switched off if preferred).

Reporting the Spammers

Spammers rely on victims not doing anything about spam and as long as this continues the spammers will flourish. Spammers can be reported to the administrators of the systems they use to launch spam and in most cases they will be removed from those systems. If more people did this then spam would be much less of a problem but this does mean some work. It involves tracing where the spam originates (and if appropriate where the message clicks through to), then reporting them to the administrators of the servers that they are using to send the spam as well as the servers that the messages click through to.

Will You Stop Receiving Spam?

Well no, but you should see a reduction. You'll notice within a few days that some spam emails stop, some persist and new ones begin to arrive. This may sound like a losing battle but if you hadn't done anything then you'd still be getting all you got before plus the new spam.

Is All the Work Worth it?

Sometimes it feels like it's not but there are some encouragements to be had such as receiving an email from an administrator that you've reported a spammer to - like the one below

Hi

Thank you for your report concerning this Unsolicited Bulk Email incident.

The account concerned has been identified and suspended under the terms of our Acceptable Use Policy.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience that this incident may have caused.

Kind regards

An email like this brings a warm glow but there are other things to take heart from. When you trace the source of a persistent spammer who is using a particular server to launch attacks, if you notice that they've changed servers it means they've been kicked off the first one. It means they've been inconvenienced and the nice bit is that they know it was someone on their list but not who. This must be annoying for them, knowing that their list will continue to get them kicked off wherever they go but no way of doing anything about it.

Reading Spam Headers and Reporting Spammers

Reading email headers manually, that have been forged, requires technical skill and is time consuming, however commercial programs are available that will do it for you and trace the source.

Spamcop

Spamcop is an online service, that you can sign up to free, that will analyse your email headers, trace the source and forward a complaint to the relevant administrator. You can sign up to Spamcop on www.spamcop.net

How to get the Header and Body from a spam email

When you receive a spam email, if you highlight the email and right click your mouse button a menu will open. Select Properties and this will open a dialogue box with the General tab showing details about the email. Click the Details tab then the Message Source button. This will open a window with the complete header and body of the email. Highlight and copy all of this and paste it into the textarea box on the Report Spam page of Spamcop. After a pause the screen will return with the traced server name and the email address of the administrator. All you need to do is paste in a pre-prepared complaint (optional) and click the Send Spam Report Now button and the job is done.
So don't just sit back and take it - get reporting.

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