Re: what is spam?

Duncan Fletcher (dfletche@gte.net)
Sun, 12 Jan 1997 17:35:21 -0800

SPAM is excessive cross posting in news groups. The term is also used (not quite
accurately) to refer to advertising which is what was meant in the recent exchange.
Depending on how one interprets federal law, unsolicitated e-mail may be illegal, but
there have yet to be any test cases. It is a violation of the terms of service of most
(but not all - some are set up for this purpose) internet service providers. Usually
sending a copy with COMPLETE headers will bring about a correction. Unfortunately with
list serve mail, critical portions of the header are stripped by the list server. Only
the list serve administrators have the mail with the completer headers. Portions of the
header can be forged and in order to track the problem, the postmaster needs complete
headers. If it comes from a list server, delete it and move on. If it comes to you
directly and your software allows you to get complete headers, then forwarding a
complaint with the original message including complete headers to the postmaster of the
originating ISP (and sometimes the upstream provider) is in order.

Duncan Fletcher
dfletche@gte.net

Mary H. Moore wrote:
>
> spam: also known as junk mail. whenever i get it, i send it right
> back to the postmaster (and i did NOT send it back to ridecamp...if
> youll read the headers you can ALWAYS find where stuff originates).
> if the host server gets enough complaints, they will generally
> terminate the spammers account
>
> :-)
>
> mary and One Smart Poky Dot