Programming Internet Email

Revenge

If a particular spammer annoys you beyond your ability to control your emotions, or if you are an anti-spam crusader and wish to spend some time chasing spammers, this section is for you. We do not advocate retribution in any hostile sense, such as mail bombs, but we do believe that abusers of the system should pay the price—generally through losing their ISP account. Recipients of spam are encouraged to work within the system to achieve their desired result. Most ISPs have a policy against spam and will assist you if you contact them with the appropriate information. This section describes how you can go about collecting that information.

Note

A mail bomb is a vindictive attack in response to perceived Net abuse; a person mails, for example, a hundred (or a thousand) copies of a FAQ to a recipient, thus filling his Inbox with many messages. This may have been effective in the smaller pre-1994 Internet but today only serves to annoy people—especially if the wrong person gets the result. I do not advocate mail bombs as an appropriate way to address spam.

It is the rare spammer that sends bulk email from a legitimate email address. Those that do find their accounts flooded with requests to unsubscribe, abusive descriptions of their lineage, and mail bombs. You would think that they would get the message, but most have avoided this problem by simply lying about their return address. It is therefore difficult to use information in the From or Reply-To headers of a spam message ...