> either their unsubscribe link is blank or it takes me to a site that
> bitdefender says b donbt go there, buddyb probably wouldnbt do
> anything but tell them I have an active address anyway...
Right. Never unsubscribe from anything that you didn't subscribe to in the
first place; and never click on any links in the spam.
Verified addresses are worth money, so any kind of a response from you
guarantees that the spammer will be selling your email
address to other spammers for years to come.
And the links very often lead to various kinds of malware attacks, virus
downloads and such. Easy way to get infected.
> Anyone have a way to stop this... Ibm probably getting 30
> to 40 a day
Ok, this is really tedious, and takes time to start working. But it does work
eventually. You have to learn how to first find and
then read the email header, so you can find what IP address supplied the spam.
In Outlook 2003, click on Tools/Options, then copy
the text from the little window into a new text file.
Now look up that IP address on one of the many sites that will do a reverse IP
lookup for you, to find the ISP that owns the address
that provided the spam.
If it's a reputable ISP (or located in a country where you might want to
correspond with a resident), then fire off an email to the
"abuse" email address listed with a copy to the "admin". State your case
simply and politely, just "I received unsolicited
commercial email (spam) from a site in your domain. Please take appropriate
steps to ensure this does not happen again."; and
include the original header and message (without attachments or HTML).
Typically you won't get anything back except maybe a canned
"Your complaint has been received"; but typically you won't hear from that
spammer again either.
More often, it will be one of the many "spam havens" in places like Russia or
Nigeria. In that case, just set up a rule that moves
anything from that block of IP addresses to your spam folder. They will keep
spamming you for awhile, but eventually quit when they
never get a response. At the peak, I had probably 150 such rules and hundreds
of spams a week, but now I get almost no spam at all
(maybe 2 or 3 per week). In the meantime, you'll have to scan the folder
occasionally for messages that weren't spam, and possibly
delete the associated rule. Some honest people use the same ISPs that harbor
spammers, so this is only a 99% solution, not 100%.
Randall
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