My Travels on the Net

I got the most obnoxious SPAM email this weekend. It wasn’t the product they were pushing that was so offensive. It was the statement at the end of the email that started with a claim that if I were getting this email, I signed up to receive it (which I most certainly did not because I couldn’t care less about another “make money at home opportunity”) and ended with “Any person who make a false report of alleged spam IS GUILTY OF BOTH FRAUD AND A CIVIL CRIME.” (The emphasis is theirs.)

That made me mad. Don’t send me SPAM and then make vague threats about being guilty of fraud and civil crime if I complain. So I decided to do something about it.

The email was supposedly from mybizathome@gmail.com. Hmmm. Sending an email from an address that is obviously not your regular email address. Now that doesn’t look spammy at all! When I looked at the email header information* I could tell that the spammer was spoofing this email address because it didn’t come from Google’s mail server but from an Earthlink mail server. (Spoofing is when a sender hides the real email address their sending the message from and makes it look like it’s coming from another and is a huge red flag that the email is spam.)

Fortunately, there are forces of good on the internet as well as bad. So, I went over to SpamCop.net, created an account and filed a complaint. Spamcop is a free service that figures out the origin of an email and sends a report to the relevant ISP. They sent my complaint to Earthlink’s network administrators and the whole thing only took a few minutes. Will this guy get shut down because of it? Probably not. But if enough people complain he might. At the very least I feel a lot better for having done something about it.

*Email Header Information

1. Click on the email to highlight it but don’t open it.
   Then right click on the message.
   It will pull up a screen that should look something like this:

This information in the box I’ve highlighted is the information you will need when making a spam complaint.

Labels: email header information, spam complaint