Re the obnoxious Tempting Tearouts spam

[Kurt Cockrum]

Charlie Barb said:
>[...quoted spammage deleted...]
>This is some advertising I just found in my mail box.  It was un-
>solicited.  Can you do anything about it?  I messaged you before
>about some other advertising I found and I believe you needed some
>more information so I am forwarding this to you for documentation.

Generally when I get such spammage (I got the same stuff Charlie did)
I reply, quoting THE WHOLE THING (mailheaders and all, especially not
deleting the received-log part) and send it to root and postmaster at
the sites appearing early in the received-chain (the collection of
e-mail headers beginning with the string "Received: ", especially
those sites near the beginning of the chain that appear to be
part of the originating domain or adjacent to it), with a note
explaining that this is a reply to unsolicited e-mail, and that it
"looks like a SPAM!".

Generally it's not too useful to do this to postmasters and roots of
sites adjacent to your ISP; those sites are just "common carriers"
and can't reasonably be held responsible for content.  But the admins
of sites that connect the miscreant to the backbone (i. e. their ISP)
can and should be bugged about the spam.

The only difficulties I've seen are that many of the originating sites
appear to be non-existent (at least to DNS).  This may be a property of
a pseudo-site with a variable IP address, i. e. when they don't actually
have a SLIP or PPP connection going to their ISP they effectively don't
exist as far as DNS is concerned, and so mail to them bounces because
SMTP believes what DNS says about the site.  Just throw out the bounced
stuff.  But their ISP should appear in
the mailheader.  Complaining to the roots *and* postmasters at such sites
is pretty effective if the ISP is reputable.  I've gotten replies from the
roots at such sites indicating that they have kicked off the offending
user, so they do pay attention.  Your mileage may vary, according to the
conscience of the target root or postmaster.  Complaining to the offending
ISP's ISP can also have good results.

If the unsolicited e-mail contains instructions on what to do to avoid
future mail contact or to get removed from their mailing list, you
should generally follow it (but don't do anything that involves sending
money or other consideration).  Often there's a line that says something
like: "If you don't want to receive more mailings from us, send e-mail
with a line saying
	`remove me from your mailing list'".
That should be obeyed, with cc's to postmaster at offending.site and
root at offending.site as usual.

Users with consumer-grade mail user agents that trim mailheaders or
don't allow the user to configure what gets edited out of the mailheader
lose here.  They should complain about that to their mail user agent
vendor or change products or even (dare I say it?? :) get a *real*
operating system :) :) (might I suggest Linux?).

Of course, an alternative is to become technically enough
proficient with the internet to exploit various control mechanisms built
into it that cause pain to the offending sites.  Basically, this means
boning up on the internet RFC's, which is not "life-compatible".  This
may or may not be "illegal" or "unethical".  I don't consider myself
qualified to advise on the illegality or ethicity of any activity.
Many things that I think are perfectly OK the "outside world" thinks
are "unethical" or "criminal", and many things the "outside world" thinks
are OK, or even laudable, to me appear to plumb the depths of evil.  I only
know that it's possible to do certain things.  If you take this route, it's
advisable not to brag about it, even to those you trust.  Of course,
I don't advocate this.  That would be wrong.
--kurt
Q: How can you tell if somebody's a radio announcer?
A: Ask them for the name of the 7th planet of the solar system.
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