Yeah, right. Writing to network administrators sometimes works, or at least puts the spammer into "Whack-a-Mole" mode where they've got to keep switching their sucker-collection endpoints. (Unfortunately, free email accounts make that pretty simple, but you can at least reduce revenue collection from existing spams, and for spammers selling spamware rather than other scams, it's important to discourage new suckers from getting in the game.) A more appropriate response would be to subscribe them to the cypherpunks list (:-) Unfortunately, this is bad - the main impact of responding to spammer's "remove me" or complaint email addresses is that it confirms to the spammer that they had a valid address, so they can reuse it or resell it. So sending the list would make it easier for the spammers to spam you directly. There are more cypherpunkish approaches - the "teergrube" project (go search for the FAQ) or similar trap servers can absorb infinite quantities of spam, v....e....r...y....s...l...o...w...l..y, so you can reply with lots of "thank you" or "remove me" or "yes, send me spam, please, please" mail from teergrubed addresses.
At 6:23 PM -0700 10/18/00, jfanonymous@yahoo.com wrote:
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Here's my idea of how to stop advertisers from using this mailing list as an advertising channel:
If everytime anyone saw junk mail here, they wrote to the address of the sender and/or the address where you send an e-mail if you're interested, and told them how annoyed you were.
Just an idea.
Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639