DEALING WITH SPAMMERS - "The Bald Guy - SPAM Attack!"

[Mom2Serve]

I received this article not long after I posted about the spammers hitting my box with trash. lt has some helpful suggestions so I wanted to pass on.........
-> The Bald Guy: SPAM Attack!

Hey, gang, welcome to another WorldVillage Newsletter!

I remember the golden old days when I first ventured into the online world. I joined AOL in 1994. Every time I signed on, I jumped out of my shoes when I heard "You've got mail!" That meant that I had received a legitimate message from someone! It was cool.
After six months or so, I began getting my first spam. I was outraged. How could some slob send me junk email that I didn't request, trying to get me to buy something? Worse, as time went by, the pornographic spams began making their appearance. What kind of disgusting individual sends such garbage out to the general public? Spammers, that's who.
I used to instantly reply to their unsubscribe addresses in an effort to stem the ever-growing tide. Mistake! What I did was reveal my email address as a "legitimate" one, and it was promptly passed on to others with a star beside identifying it as a particularly valuable asset.
Later, I began using a piece of freeware which automatically emailed the sending domain informing them that they had a spammer using their services and threatening legal action if they didn't put a stop to it ASAP. However, it seemed that the vast majority of emails would bounce, a testimony to the spammer's ability to hide themselves.
Well, I guess I accepted spam as a fact of life at that point. I simply deleted the gob of junk email that I would receive on a daily basis. I once went on vacation for a week, and came home to 300 messages, 4/5 of which were spam.
But a year ago, something happened which got me involved in actively fighting spam. I began getting lots of bounced email messages that I had never sent. This went on for a week, eventually amounting to a couple of hundred bad emails. I contacted my hosting provider, and, looking at my logfiles, they determined that someone in Eastern Europe was hacking into
my cgi-bin directory and using my copy of formmail.pl to spam others! The spam actually showed up as having originated from baldguyweb.com!
Now, I was mad. I deleted formmail.pl (I never used it anyway), then went on the offensive. I turns out that I have a cool feature as part of my hosting account. I have a text file to which I can add the email addresses and/or domains of spammers. If I get email from someone on the list, it gets bounced before I ever see it. If I get mail from a domain that doesn't offer free email accounts, I visit their website. If it's not involved in promotion emailing, then I inform them that someone is probably hacking their formmail.pl script. If the emails continue after that, I block the domain.
However, free email services like yahoo, hotmail, eudoramail, and others pose a special problem. I would frequently get mail from address like [Only registered and activated users can see links. Either login above or Register Now], [Only registered and activated users can see links. Either login above or Register Now], etc. In other words, illegitimate email accounts, intended only to spam a few times, then be abandoned. The folks at the free email providers would always have one of two answers for me: (1) the spammer only appeared to be coming from their account or (2) a couple of weeks after my complaint, an account would be deleted. In the meantime, I've blocked the email address. However, I would then get spam from a slightly different one, [Only registered and activated users can see links. Either login above or Register Now] instead of [Only registered and activated users can see links. Either login above or Register Now], for instance.
The end result is that I finally blocked ALL mail from yahoo.com,
hotmail.com, eudoramail.com, email.com, usa.com, and a few others that were chronic sources of spam. I hated to take such a drastic step, but the spam I receive is now down to perhaps five a day.
I do periodically go through my bounced mail list and send an apologetic email to individual email addresses that appear to be legitimate explaining my actions, and suggesting that they can contact me via their isp email account or use my mail form at ttp://baldguyweb.com/contact.htm
At this point, I would like to state that I very rarely receive spam from aol.com addresses, a tribute to their strong antispam policies.
Spam stinks, folks. A small group of scum have encroached on the rights of others by sending this despicable electronic dreck out to others. I'm not the only one who's blocking free email accounts. Got to yahoo.com and do a search on spam to get a list of sites that are actively fighting this plague. Let's take our email back, friends.

[buckeyemomma]

I got the same email