Smutty Spam

torrella@umich.edu torrella@umich.edu
Tue Aug 4 22:09 MDT 1998


Unfortunately, in the wild world of internet email, there are
individuals whose job is to attract as many "lowest common
denominator" folks to view generally poor quality smut.  It's also
unfortunate that, if you have an email address -- regardless of who
(organization, institution or individual) or where you are -- this
junk mail is bound to find its way into your emailbox.  Even more
unfortunate is the fact that the individual(s) who sends this tripe is
usually able to disguise his or her identity (vis-a-vis email address)
with the aid of specially written programs.  It's a lot like the crap
that one gets in the US Mail, except that the US Mail has strict rules
about what kind of junkmail can be sent and which cannot be sent
through the US Mails.  Because the sender is typically unidentified in
the string of headers preceding the email message, sending angry
replies to who you think is the sender usually gets you a message from
some mail daemon saying that no such person exists. Gee, I wonder why.

Right now, the only way to control the content of what comes into your
emailbox is by using mail filters.  I use mail filters to sort email
into specific folders (I use Communicator at home and PINE at work) as
it's downloaded onto my harddrive.  I've occasionally gotten some of
this junk -- the result of some latenight meandering that
inadvertently left me staring at some indelicate body part.  I can
usually tell how/why I got a certain piece of email, basing its
arrival on the proximity of when I might have wandered into what my
wife refers to as "No-No Land."  The other way to control what's in
your emailbox -- please don't flame me -- is to use your delete key
liberally.  (I may very well have gotten the offensive email that
stirred things up, but routinely deleted it without a thought.)

The "activist" thing to do is to figure out who the system
administrator is at the domain name on the email address and send that
person a copy of the offensive email *complete with full headers*.
This alerts the owner/administrator of that domain to the likelihood
of future (usually unapproved) uses of their domain name.  Companies
like Juno and Yahoo! specifically prohibit spamming, but that doesn't
stop outsiders from using their domain names.  However, Juno has
successfully found and sued several individuals who weren't smart
enough for Juno's sleuths. The folks at Juno appreciate being alerted
to violations of their spam ban. The person to complain to at Juno is
<postmaster@juno.com>. The more complaints they receive, the more time
they may spend trying to track down the perpetrators.

Although there's really no way (now) to stop this crud from wafting
into your emailbox, at least we can take a proactive approach and
alert officials to the problem.  Let them try to stop it.

In the meanwhile, I think it's safe to say that nobody in PTG would
deign to send this stuff to the lists.  I think the general
intelligence of this organization is considerably higher than the
"lowest common denominator" crowd.

Happy PTGing!

Ron Torrella, RPT
Ethics Committee, Chair



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