What Not To Do About Spam or Spammers


This article explains why you must not fight back against a spammer in illegal ways .

When dealing with a spammer or a rogue site, don't strike back in any ILLEGAL WAY such as:

* Threaten violence or vandalism;
* Mailbomb the site;
* Mailbomb the alleged spammer, who may be an innocent third party such as myself;
* Ping-storm or SYN-flood the site;
* Hack into the site;
* Try in any way to bring the site down illegally.

And above all else, don't use spam to fight spam. This also applies in Usenet - don't follow up to spam postings, lest your posting also become spam.

Many people who receive UCE want to strike back at the senders in some fashion- this urge is magnified when the spam is particularly offensive or obnoxious. Simply put, attacking senders of UCE is not a good idea, for a number of reasons:

* It's Illegal. You can get into a lot of trouble for attacking another computer or network. Denial of Service (DOS) attacks are the most common type of attack, and can land you in jail. Hacking your way into the offender's computer is definitely going to produce the men at your door with their sense of humor surgically removed.

* Don't Lower Yourself. There's no reason to stoop to the level of spammers. Sending mailbombs, SYN floods, or other attacks against senders of UCE just makes you look childish.

* You May Hit the Wrong Target. Many spams are forged to look as though they came from somewhere other than the true origin. This often leads to innocent third parties getting flamed for no reason, which does nothing to help fight spam.

* It Reduces the Credibility of Us All. Whenever someone attacks a spammer's system, they are simply giving the spammer more publicity, as the media will pick up the story, which will quickly translate into sympathy for the poor, put-upon, business who is being unfairly targeted by Internet loonies. When the attack finishes, the spammer will be better off than if the attack had never occured.


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Martin Reinert has been hosting web sites and registering domain names for people, organizations and businesses since 1997 and now with the website EasyCheapWebhosting.com. Martin Reinert has been a domain name consultant for a number of years handling over thousand domain names.
Fighting spammers the legal way Martin has been able to close down many spam promoted web sites.
© Martin Reinert. - This article may be republished only if this info about the author is printed just as plainly as the article itself and with this note below the article including the active links it contains.