Reporting spam is a good way to fight the problem. You need to know who to report to and what to report. The first rule of thumb is NOT to complain directly to the spammer. As stated above, any reply to the spammer simply tells them your email address is valid. That makes your email address more valuable as a commodity to the spammer. They don’t care how huffy or puffy you get in your email. The proper parties to contact are the people through which the spammer operates. The idea is to cut off their ability to deliver spam or to create some sort of backlash against the spammer. You can do this by either contacting the ISP which is hosting the email servers which were used to send the spam or by contacting the ISP who hosts the company which was being advertised in the spam. The idea here is that the spammer obviously doesn’t care whether you like the spam or not. The website being advertised by the spammer is either his own (which of course won’t get you anywhere) or is owned by a company which may have no qualms with spam because they are making money. However, almost all ISPs will care immensely if anyone is using their systems to send spam. As stated previously, spam costs the ISP industry a whole lot of money. If an ISP becomes aware that they are empowering a user to send spam, they will almost always shut down the account.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article.