How stuff works section
Spam is any excessive, unwanted e-mail message news group posting.I do not define threatening email as "spam".
How do spammers get my email address?
There are numerous ways that spammers can get email addresses for mass mailings:
What can you do about spam?
Avoiding unsolicited e-mail is difficult. As of January, 2001, there are no Federal laws in the United States prohibiting spam.
The Direct Marketing Association's E-mail Preference Service, lets you register e-mail addresses that you would like to keep out of mailing lists.
The DMA, which is the direct marketing industry's leading trade group, says all of its 4,500 members will be required to take registered addresses off of their mailing lists, while non-members can also use the service.
Easy to use tools for identifying spammers and complaining to their ISPs are available.
Once you know what machine the message came from, you're ready to use traceroute and/or whois to find out who the internet service provider is. Traceroute will show the route that packets take when they are routed to the target machine (the machine that sent you the email spam). If you look at the site just "upstream" from the target site, typically that will be the site's internet service provider, who may have some leverage over their behavior.
Using "whois", you can sometimes get contact information for the ISP. Also, writing to "postmaster" or "abuse" at the ISP domain name will sometimes get through.
If you do send e-mail to the Internet Service Provider, you're more likely to get a helpful response if you send a polite complaint.
E-mail bombing the sender or the ISP is not helpful - the return address is probably forged/phony. Also, e-mail bombing can backfire on your own systems, and can be viewed as a criminal act. [Sorry to have to mention that, but it's happened.]
Also, don't be fooled by scams which solicit your e-mail address in order to block future spam. One scam currently circulating is called the "REMOVE" list and promises to block many internet mass mailings. Instead, subscribers report receiving 10 - 15 junk mail messages a day.
The lists that these spammers use come from a number of sources. When you fill in a registration card or enter optional information into a web site, your e-mail address can be added to the list. If you post to a newsgroup, your e-mail address can be harvested. Web pages with your e-mail address are also a source for lists. These lists are quickly created with the help of spambots that continually surf the internet searching for e-mail addresses. Once a list is created, it is used for bulk e-mailing and sold to others for a low price (e.g., 1,000,000 e-mail addresses for $50).
The spammers philosophy is based on the concept of volume. If 100 e-mails get 1 response, 1,000,000 e-mails will get 10,000 responses. With normal junk mail, it costs too much to send out millions of solicitations. Unfortunately, the cost to the sender for sending a million e-mails is the same as sending one e-mail. Given that these people are engaged in get rich quick schemes, we can't expect that their sense of morality will stop them from abusing the system.
What should you do?