Sooner or later, you are going to find an unpleasant surprise in you e-mail — an electronic letter from somebody you don't know trying to sell you a dubious or non-existing product or a fraudulent service, involve you in a chain letter or a get-rich-quick scheme, or trying to sell you dial-a-porn or child pornography. The "spam" you receive may be as simple as unsolicited commercial e-mail asking you to patronize a certain stockbroker (who may be a fraud), or it may be the same kind of outright lie that you hear about every day when some unsuspecting person has their life savings "conned" by a sharp telemarketing fraud scheme. There are two things that you can be sure of: You will get spammed. The offer (if any) will be fraudulent. (Some spam is only meant to be annoying.)

What is spam?

E-mail spam is bulk direct e-mail messages sent to individual accounts. It is both like and unlike bulk snail-mail and telemarketing.

• About half of the spam will be offers of mailing lists and programs for spamming other people.

• About 10% of the spam will be offers of snooping software to spy on your neighbors, children, employees, or spouse.

• About 5% of the spam will be telling you about wonderful investments in an attempt to manipulate the stock market (by making the stock go up), or false rumors about a company in an attempt to manipulate the stock market (by making the stock go down).

• 100% of the spam you get will be fraudulent in some way.

Spam is like bulk snail-mail in these ways:

• It is sent to large groups of individuals.

• It is usually intended to get you to spend money with (or send money to) the sender.

Spam is different from bulk snail-mail in these ways:

• It is not targeted to a specific group, but is sent to everybody because the sender is not paying the cost of sending it.

• It is paid for by the receiver and not the sender. The receiver wastes time downloading it before finding out that it is junk mail. In addition to wasting time, this may also cost money for anyone with measured phone service — many people in cities, and almost everyone in Europe.

• Spam messages are for stuff that is not worth advertising in any medium where the sellers actually have to pay the cost of the ads. The cost of spamming is so low that there is no point in targeting ads. For the same low price the spammer can send ads to everyone.

• Bulk (third-class) mailers pay postage to distribute their materials. Spam is the equivalent of bulk mail that arrives postage-due. Real people pay real money, in the form of disk space charges, connect time, or even long-distance connections, to receive junk e-mail.

• Spam is more like junk fax than bulk snail-mail. It is sent at the convenience of the sender and at the expense of the receiver. With third class mail, if you don't want it, you throw it out. It takes very little time — you only have to glance at each envelope. With spam e-mail, you spend time and possibly money to receive it, whether you ever read it or not.

Spam is like telemarketing in this way:

• Spam messages are almost without exception advertisements for things that are worthless, deceptive, or partly or entirely fraudulent.

Spam is different from telemarketing in this way:

• A telemarketer has staff expenses, facility expenses (rent), phone expenses, and training expenses. Telemarketers cannot call collect. A spammer gets a throwaway account, a free trial disk, or signs up with a mass-mailing company, and then sends a message to hundreds of thousands of people.

How Did My Name Get on a Spam Mailing List?

E-mail spam lists are created in several ways:

• By scanning newsgroup postings. (This is why many newsgroup posters use false return addresses.)

• By hacking local Internet Service Providers. Clever hackers can sometimes get a list of all accounts, or alternately, can penetrate the Internet Service Provider in such a way that they broadcast to all accounts without actually obtaining the list.

• By stealing Internet mailing lists. Because many mailing lists limit activity to their subscribers, spammers will use automated tools to subscribe to as many mailing lists as possible, and then grab anything that has the correct format for an addresses.

• By stealing compiled lists from legitimate businesses that provide directory services.

• If there's a way to get your name, the spammers will find it.

Con-men and thieves are gravitating toward massive spams as a way to perpetrate their crimes.

What is the best way to deal with spam?

• Do not — ever:

  • Threaten violence or vandalism.
  • Mailbomb the site.
  • Hack into the site.
  • Try in any way to bring the site down illegally.

And above all else, don't use spam to fight spam. All of these things just make the problem worse.

• Complain To The Spammer's Internet Service Provider

  • There is little point in complaining to the guilty party — they don't care, and usually have the account set up in such a way that they won't receive complaints.

  • Complain to whoever is providing them with internet access.

    • Look to see if the message includes an e-mail address to reply to or a web page to look at. The domain name is the part after the @ in an e-mail address. For example, our email address is . Our domain name is mimidolls.com. In a web address, it is usually the part after "www" and before the next slash. For example, our web address is www.mimidolls.com. Our domain name is mimidolls.com. (Please don't send your complaints to us, we can't do anything about it.)

    • Another way to determine where the spam originates is to turn on "show all headers" if you know how to do this for your e-mail program. Usually, this will be an option on one of the menus at the top of the e-mail program's window. You will see one or more lines that say: "Received." Look for the last Received line. It will say: "Received: from spammer.name.group" where "name.group" (usually "name.com") is the domain.

    • Send a letter of complaint to: postmaster@domain, abuse@domain, and root@domain. It may be a good idea to send the letter of complaint to the postmaster, abuse, and root accounts at all of the domains listed in all of the Received lines (except your own domain of course). You might want to mention in your letter that you are not sure who to send the complaint to and ask that it be forwarded as appropriate.

    • Include the full headers of the message you are complaining about. That is the From line, the To line, the Reply To line (if any), and all of the Received lines.

    • You may get an automatic response from some of the larger Internet Service Providers (ISPs), or you may get no response because smaller ISPs are overwhelmed with complaints.

    • Some (or all) of your letters of complaint may bounce back to you as undeliverable. If they do, just ignore them — you can't win them all, and some ISPs don't use the standard names (postmaster, abuse, and root).

    • Be polite in your letter of complaint. It works better than being nasty.

• Complain to your elected political officials:

  Complain Loud and Complain Often. Forward representative samples with a demand that spam be banned or taxed. Be outraged!

  • Complain to your state Senators
    Complain to your House Representative
    Complain to the Govenor of your State

  • Complain to the President and Vice President of the United States

Where can I get more information?

• Fight Spam on the Internet!

• Department of Justice Internet and Telemarketing Fraud