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Stop
unwanted email advertising What
is spam? Where
does it come from? Unscrupulous
marketers, usually hawking get-rich-quick And
it's getting worse. You've heard of
spam, but how about velveeta? On
the internet, velveeta is excessively crossposting an article to several
newsgroups. In most cases, the
newsgroup and article are not even about the same topic.
How cheesy is that? The
anti-spam zone website put it best, "No reputable companies or businesses
*need* to lower themselves to spamming in order to remain in business - so if
someone spams you and their 'offer' sounds 'too good to be true', then beware -
it almost certainly *is* too good to be true." Help them in their campaign by visiting
canismajor.demon.co.uk/antispam/antispam.htm. What
is being done about it? There
are laws to help protect our rights. Read
about current and upcoming legislation at spamlaws.com.
The Internet Mail Consortium goes to great lengths to explain efforts
being made by our government, software writers, and their members to reduce UBE
(unwanted bulk email, another name for spam and velveeta). Visit them at imc.org/imc-spam. Most
spam is sent via an architecture called "open relay".
An open relay allows Spammers to send unsolicited commercial email
(commonly known as Spam) through the server's mail system easily. When spammers
are aware that one exists on a system, they will readily abuse it to send their
junk mail far and wide. Bigfoot.com
is one of the first email services to take a major stand against spam.
They have imposed a ban on any online email services which permits open
relay useage. How
can you help stop it? Check
the blacklist at math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/BL for companies who have been
sending offers now identified as scams and spams. Follow their instructions for how you can report offenders
and avoid purchasing from them. Use
the utilities found at spamcop.net. Their
tools allows users to paste spam messages into a form, and then SpamCop does the
rest. It tracks down the sender's server administrator and sends a complaint.
In most cases the sender will at least lose his internet access through
his current provider. At
mail-abuse.org you will find lists of both dial-up customers as well as those
with dedicated IP addresses. Spam.abuse.net gives advice on filtering email to
your personal account and blocking spam email for an entire site.
You will also find spam filters built into online email services such as
MSN, Hotmail, and Yahoo messaging, although as you may already know they Until
more widespread efforts are made to eliminate this waste of bandwidth you'll
have to
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