Developer's Corner

I receive about 20 spam messages in my mailbox every day. I know this can be considered a low number, since I know of users receiving hundreds of spam, with a variety of subjects, ranging from porn sites to viagra, medicines, casino, software, etc.

I wonder how can these spammers think that I'm so stupid to use my credit card to buy their products - but indeed I'm afraid that if they persist in their illegal business is because there are people who buy from them.

Anyway, what can we do to fight against them? There are several services which detect messages and prevent them from reaching our mail client, and mail client add-ons which move suspect messages into a spam folder, so that we don't have to waste time reading messages we aren't interested in. But is this a good way to fight spammers? Do they prevent spammers from sending you emails if you don't buy from them? Unfortunately I don't think so.

What can we do? Report spam.

Since Internet has no country borders, it's quite unlikely that recurring to law leads to a result, although I think this could be done - but unfortunately it doesn't happen.

The only thing I can do is to repay them with the same money: making them waste time.

• the ISP used by the spammer to send the email
• the web hosting company which hosts the site referenced in the spam email

The next step was to write a complain email to both recipients, asking for the spammer's account to be suspended. This way, the spammer needs to change ISP and move its website to another hosting provider. This is a cost of their business, and I'm sure spammers have planned it - and I also want to be sure to keep this cost high for them.

I was used to perform these actions manually, by reading the email header, and using tools such as nslookup to find what I needed, but this is undoubtedly a time consuming process, and I did it while the number of spams was less than 10 per day.

But there is a better way: a service where you simply have to report the mail body and headers, and it will take care of reverse-engineering the information required, automatically fill in complaint reports and send them to the proper recipients. Its name is SpamCop, and their website is www.spamcop.net. Although the service requires a subscription (quite low, since it is about 1$ for each Mbyte of reported spam), it can also be used for free, in this case with a delay screen which reminds about subscribing - about 10 seconds to wait before completing the spam email analysis.

This of course doesn't guarantee that actions are taken against spammers. There are ISP which themselves fight against spammers, and once they receive reports they verify, and if required take their actions, which can range from deactivating the spammer's accounts to charge them and using legal ways (but this last one is the least used - unfortunately).