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How to Complain About Spam
``` Please do not forward this message. It is a draft of a short article that explains how to report suspicious spam to appropriate legal authorities and Internet service providers. I have tried to keep it as simple as possible. In particular, I have not tried to explain the legal issues in detail, since it is the authorities' job to investigate whether a given suspicious or offensive spam message violates any laws. Likewise, it is an ISP's own decision whether to initiate legal action against a spammer who abuses its facilities.
I'm hoping that you can read this draft. Let me know about any factual errors or any other specific information such as addresses or high-quality URL's that might be good to include. I think many people are despairing about spam right now, and I'd like to help erase that despair by providing simple actions that people can take to bring justice in those cases where it is most required.
Thanks a lot
Phil
Encl:
DRAFT FOR COMMENT -- DO NOT CIRCULATE
How to Complain About Spam, or, Put a Spammer in the Slammer
Phil Agre http://communication.ucsd.edu/pagre/
November 1997
DRAFT FOR COMMENT -- DO NOT CIRCULATE
DRAFT FOR COMMENT -- DO NOT CIRCULATE
Unsolicited commercial bulk e-mail, commonly called "spam", has become an extraordinary nuisance. Spam as such is not illegal. A large proportion of the actual spam messages, however, do violate some state or federal law. Many others violate the spammer's contract with his or her Internet Service Provider, or else cause enough harm to a third party to warrant a civil lawsuit. No legal action will be taken against a spammer, however, unless someone reports the problem. This article does not provide legal advice. It does, however, provide instructions for reporting messages that may, in your judgement, deserve further investigation by appropriate authorities. Reporting spam does take a little effort at first, but once you get a little practice, it can easily become a routine part of reading e-mail.
The contact information I provide here is incomplete, and at present includes only the United States. Those with contact information for other jurisdictions are encouraged to send it along for including in future editions.
(1) Potential fraud and related issues
Many spam messages make offers that seem too good to be true, for example money-making pyramid schemes, impossibly lucrative work-at-home deals, suspiciously low prices, disingenuously described goods, and so forth. You needn't judge for yourself which messages are legal. If you find a messages suspicious then you have a right, and perhaps even a moral duty to others less sophisticated than yourself, to report the possible fraud or misrepresentation to the Federal Trade Commission. Simply print the message out, add a simple cover letter expressing your concerns, and mail it to:
Federal Trade Commission 6th Street and Pennsylvania Ave NW Washington, DC 20580
The FTC doesn't settle particular disputes, but it is very interested in patterns, and a massive, fraudulent spam is nothing if not a pattern.
(2) Issues relating to paper mail
Schemes that employ the US mail may interest postal inspectors. If a suspicious spam message includes a US mail address, you might send a copy of the message to the postmaster for the city and zip code in the address. Again, simply print it out, add a simple cover letter expressing your concerns, and mail it to:
Postmaster Anytown, XX 12345
(3) Complaining to the police
Messages that are obviously illegal can also be reported to the FBI, to the attorney general of any state that the message claims as its origin, and to the local police. In each case, once again, simply print out the message and include a brief cover letter expressing your concerns.
To find the address of the nearest FBI field office, consult the following web page:
http://www.fbi.gov/fo/fo.htm
You can get the address for a given state's attorney general's office by calling them on the phone; you can get their phone number by calling directory information for the state capital (1 + the state capital's area code + 555 1212). If you send me the addresses for the attorneys general of some of the larger states then I will include them in future editions of this article.
If the message includes a postal address then you can get the address for the spammer's local police department similarly.
(4) Complaining to your legislator
If you receive a particularly outrageous item of spam, you can use it to help educate your elected representatives on the need for appropriate legislative action. You might focus particularly on state legislators, because action is most likely at the state level. At least one state, Nevada, has passed very bad legislation in this area because legislators were not well-enough educated. You can easily identify your legislators and obtain their addresses by calling your state's capitol building.
(5) Complaining to the service provider
Most Internet Service Providers require all of their subscribers to sign contracts that forbid spam. It is appropriate, therefore, to complain to any ISP whose users originate spam. The ISP usually isn't responsible for the spam, so be polite. But do encourage the ISP to take action against the offender, and to strengthen its contractual language so that future offenders face stronger penalties for spamming.
The hard question is how to identify the spammer's ISP. The most obvious approach is to look in the From: field of the spam message's header. If you see a field like:
From: yourfriend@flowers.net
you can be confident that the header was forged and that the message did not originate at flowers.net. Likewise, any header field such as:
Comment: Authenticated sender is otherguy@aol.com
is probably bogus as well. Another part of the header, however, is much less likely to be forged. It looks like this:
Received: from networld.com ([194.177.96.7])
by weber.ucsd.edu (8.8.6/8.8.6) with ESMTP id QAA23180
for
If you don't see any "Received:" fields in the header, that's because your mail-reading program isn't displaying the complete header. Consult the program's documentation, or your ISP or system administrator, to find out how to see the complete headers. (It may be simple as using an alternate command to write the message to a file.) You will usually see several "Received:" fields, which are supposed to trace which machines the message has passed through. Many spam messages include bogus "Received:" fields to throw you off track. But if you look at a header closely, you will usually find that one or more of the fields mentions your own site; the one you want is the one that records the message's first arrival within your site. This field was generated by the mailer at your site, so it is probably reliable. In the case of (fictional) the "Received:" field that I quoted above, the message came from networld.com. To report the message, therefore, you should forward a copy of it like so:
To: postmaster@networld.com Subject: spam from your site
here is a spam message sent from your site ...
[include a copy of the message, including the full header]
It is very important to include the full header of the message because that's the site maintainer's major source of clues about the message's actual origins. In fact, the site to which you are complaining was most likely "hijacked" against its will to produce spam. This is very common, and it generally results in torrents of "bouncemail" for the messages that the spammer sent to bad addresses -- potential cause for a lawsuit. Even if no lawsuit is filed, the site's maintainers need to upgrade their software to prevent this sort of hijacking in the future, and your complaint will help motivate them to do so.
You can also write to the postmaster of any site that is mentioned in a URL that might be included in a spam message. Enclose a copy of the message, again with complete headers, and explain that the site in question is being used by a spammer.
(6) Other resources
Here are the URL's for some other sources of information about spam:
http://server.Berkeley.EDU/BTLJ/articles/11-2/carroll.html [more URL's for quality information sources are welcome]
(7) Conclusion
If we despair about spam then the spammers win. Many thousands of people are working against spam, each in their own way. If you simply pick the one method that you find most convenient then you can be confident that these antisocial people will eventually be compelled to find better ways of making a living.
Copyright 1997 by the author. You may forward this article electronically to anyone for any noncommercial purpose. However, you must forward it in its entirety, without modification. This article is the responsibility solely of its author. It does not represent the views of the University of California or any other organization. ```
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