Unwanted E-Mail / Spam

Unwanted E-Mail / Spam

E-mail makes a great medium for communicating with people all over the world. Unfortunately, there's no obligation on anybody's part to send you only e-mail that you're interested in reading. More companies are discovering that e-mail is a great medium for sending out thousands of advertisements to the world, a practice called "spamming".

So how does your e-mail address get onto a spam list? Internet service providers have the right to sell a list of e-mail addresses on their system and many providers often do. (No, we don't sell our list!) If you're listed in a directory database or a search engine, or if you've bought anything online, your name goes onto a list that could potentially be sold to somebody who wants to send out mass e-mails. Individual people can make their own lists of e-mail addresses and sell them, and commercial CD-ROMs are available containing lists of a half million or more e-mail addresses. Practically speaking, there's no way to know how your name got onto a particular mailing list.

So what can you do about spam?

Make sure you are on our Spam filter. If you have a DSL account or our $21 or $11 account you will have all your email filtered for viruses and spam.
Remember, people stay up night trying to find ways to get around spam filters, so you may get one or two occasionally. If this happens you can either delete the message or forward it to spam@postini.com and our spam filter diagnostics will look at this newest round of spam-escaping techniques and improve the system!
Also, avoid forwarding spam (such as chain letters) to other people. It clogs up the system as well as that person's mailbox and many people are bothered by receiving this type of email.

Some companies use a fake e-mail address to prevent you from e-mailing back to them. In cases like this, if you know how to discern the true origin by looking at the header of the e-mail, try sending e-mail to their Postmaster. Their Postmaster's address is usually "postmaster@THEIR-DOMAIN", where THEIR-DOMAIN is the last half of their e-mail address, everything after the @ sign. For example: postmaster@earthfriends.net or postmaster@connections.com .
If you don't know how to discern the true origin of the e-mail, don't e-mail the postmaster, as he will not be able to remove you from the list.
When you write to the Postmaster, it's a good idea to include a copy of some of the unwanted e-mail and (as always) to be polite and respectful rather than angry and hostile. Usually the Postmaster has no idea that someone's flooding you with unwanted e-mail until you tell them. The Postmaster and the System Administrator of the mail server can then configure their mail server so it won't allow relaying of any e-mails that aren't generated by their subscribers.

For more information on how to protect yourself from spamming and unwanted e-mail, check out these sites:

Spam.abuse.net

Spamcop.net

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Physical Address: 750 16th Street, Arcata, CA 95521

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