[thelist] The Tao of asking questions on thelist (was Protecting against ...

[Joel D Canfield]

My first thought is the virus ostensibly about snow white. Nearly every
time you receive one, you receive a disclaimer from the domain owner
announcing that they're not responsible, they're being scammed, and
here's how you can get virus protection. At least it's not a black hole.
They're saying SOMETHING which may or may not be better than silence.

joel at spinhead.com

-----Original Message-----
From: thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org
[mailto:thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org] On Behalf Of Peter-Paul Koch
Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2001 4:23 AM
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: Re: [thelist] The Tao of asking questions on thelist (was
Protecting against ...


[ . . . ]

The problem, I think, is that there is no answer to this question (see 
below).  Even the best written mail fails if no one knows.

> > My client is receiving irate replies from victims of a spammer who 
> > is using randomly-generated mailbox names under her domain.
> >
> > We all know you can type whatever REPLY-TO address you want to into 
> > just about any client or webmail app... and also that end-users are 
> > uninterested in looking at mail headers to fingerprint the actual 
> > source of an email.
> >
> > The message content included a clickthrough to <badurl here> which 
> > was there last week and gone now (no surprise there.)
> >
> > Question:
> >
> > 1) Is there *any* recourse whatsoever for this kind of thing?

Unfortunately, no (as far as I know). If her mail server is abused for 
sending spam it can be helped, but not if her domain is being used. The 
spammer just fills in an email address in his spam, and you can't
prevent 
that.

The best thing she can do is create a standard reply that explains she
can't 
help it and advises people to subscribe to http://spamcop.net and
complain 
about spam through this service.

ppk

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