I’m sure all of us know the major annoyance of seeing tons of unwanted, unsolicited e-mails gunking up our inboxes.
Usually I just delete them all without reading anything. Today, however, I got one that really made me laugh.
The “from” field was actually my e-mail address. I knew it wasn’t from me, but wondered how they had done that, so I read the spam (it was an ad for a home mortgage plan).
Here’s what it said in tiny print on the bottom:
This email was sent to you via Saf-E Mail Systems. Your email address was automatically inserted into the To and From addresses to eliminate undeliverables which waste bandwidth and cause internet congestion. Your email or webserver IS NOT being used for the sending of this mail. No-one else is receiving emails from your address. You may utilize the removal link below if you do not wish to receive this mailing.
Did you catch that–“Your email address was automatically inserted into the To and From addresses to eliminate undeliverables which waste bandwidth and cause internet congestion”???
So they are basically saying, “we used your email address so you would actually read this and reply instead of just deleting this and making it one of the many millions of ‘unreceived’ spam e-mails sent out each day.”
I found this very funny and hypocritical. They realize that their garbage causes internet congestion, but still they send it.
Anyway, maybe no one else will think this is funny, but it gave me a laugh instead of my usual feelings of anger at how much junk these “businesses” send to innocent people.
I tried a new trick today. I found the webmaster address for a spam message. Going to YAHOO news, I found a news article about spam. I selected “EMAIL THIS STORY” and used the webmaster’s address in the TO and FROM box entries, and also selected SEND THIS TO YOURSELF.
Think he’ll get the message?
Gary
“Vengance is a dish best served cold.” Kan in Star Trek’s ‘Wrath of Kan’
How does one replace one’s own email address in the from line with someone else’s? I use Netscape 6 and right and left clicked on everything I could think of. I’ve read about this being done by spammers before and I wanted to do it back to them. Believe me I spend too much time practicing whistle to become a spam agency.
Newsweek (the one that just came out-the cover story is about 401Ks) has a pretty interesting article about spammers.
I’ve been using McAfee’s SpamKiller for a couple of weeks. The good news is that it works pretty well. The bad news is that you still have to look at the list of spam that it catches because it sometimes identifies non-spam as spam. But, over time, you edit the rules it uses, create exceptions, and it gets better.
I’ve been going after these people who put my address in the reply field.
How am I to know if I’m the only person who is seeing my address in the reply field? Take a Spammers word for it? Ha Ha.
I’ve been reading the message headers and finding their real address via ‘whois’.
I’ve warned them not to use my identity and that continued use will warrant my informing their ISP and authorities of the action.
If this operation could be automatted, maybe 1000’s of people could counterspam the spammers. Now that would make them stop.
Have a great (and hopefully SPAM-less) day, all!