FTC Encourages Consumers to Forward Them Spam

Burl Ives writes "See this CNN Article. 'The FTC encourages consumers to forward any spam they receive to the e-mail address uce@ftc.gov'. I'd say if they've posted their e-mail on the web, they are probably getting as much as the rest of us already, which isn't to say I'm not hoping to see some discussion of using the statistical spam sorters to auto forward a lot to them in encouragement..." I've been using SpamAssassin for some time now with excellent results. Perhaps now I need to have my spam folder auto-forward to the FTC as well.

Comments

What will they do?

[pgrote]

I like the idea of forwarding the spam, but the question remains what will they do with it?

For instance, Yahoo Mail has a feature where you can forward Spam to their Yahoo! Customer Care department. Yet, you don't know what happens.

I don't know if this is a "feel good" attempt at showing that they are handling spam or they actually run some super secret program and change their spam variables.

I'd like to see what the FTC is doing with the spam sent to them. Are they going to start a black list? Will they take action against the spammers?

How about international use?

[vidnet]

Should I forward my spam even though I'm not American?

This is news?

[uhmmmm]

Heck, it even made it into a slashdot poll

Expiring subdomains are very helpful against spam

[DocSnyder]

If you're running your own DNS and email server, use email addresses with subdomains which will become invalid after some time.

For example, I'm a quite active Usenet poster, using "[something]@expires-[year][month].[mydomain]" as my email address. "expires-200209" means the entire subdomain will be kicked after Sep 30. After that time, the spammer won't find a MX record for that subdomain and has no possibility to annoy me with his junk.

For legitimate correspondents, I'm telling them email adresses with a subdomain which will never expire or only very far in the future.

Running the risk of having my cute web server /.'d until it blows the whistle, here is a more detailed draft.

/.
DocSnyder.

Re:Be Careful What You Wish For

[elemental23]

I had exactly the opposite problem. Earthlink has an address where you can forward spam, and every time you do, they send you an acknowledgement message!

What address are you sending it to? Spam originating outside Earthlink's network may be sent to junkmail@earthlink.net. This mailbox does not send an auto-response. You will get an auto-response if you send mail to abuse@earthlink.net (or variations, ie, abuse@corp.earthlink.net, etc), but you should only send mail to abuse if it originated on Earthlink's network.

Then I carefully read their web page about forwarding. The only people they are going after are the ones that use Earthlink's own facilities to send spam.

This is correct if you are referring to mail sent to abuse. What can Earthlink do about spam from a MSN (for example) user?

Mail sent to the junkmail address, on the other hand, is forwarded on to Brightmail who runs Earthlink's Spaminator. They will consider it for inclusion in their incoming mail filters. So this mail is being looked at, and something is being done with it (albiet not by Earthlink directly).