Last week you were given tips on reducing your own intake of spam(unsolicited bulk email), but you want spammers to pay for all the trouble they cause. Well, it's not as easy as it used to be. Spammers use complex techniques to hide the true origin of the message. Let's see how we can identify it's true origin and what to do about it.

1. View the source of the email message and find the originating server. To do this, look through the source code until you see the From: address. Directly below this will be a list of Received: addresses. The top line of the last one is the orignating server. Copy the IP address from that line.
2. Run a trace on the IP address. In Windows95/98 this can be done from the MS-DOS prompt box by typing tracert [the IP] and hitting [Enter].
3. Find the server that provides the spammer with Internet access. Try to connect to a web site on the trace list, starting from the second to the bottom, by using the last two parts of the address and adding www. eg. if the address is: pm392-flint.mich.net then use www.mich.net
4. Then find the email address of the provider. Either search the Internet provider's site for the correct address to send spam complaints to, or just use the general rule: Add abuse@ to the server address(without the www part). eg abuse@mich.net
5. Compose your message. Remember to be polite. They probably hate spam as much as you since it costs them money every time a spammer uses their service to send spam. Include the full source and complete spam message and request that they remove the spammer from their service.
6. Send the message. Don't expect a response. Some providers will have an automatic response, but most do not have time to individually respond to evey complaint.

This may seem like a lot of work to stop one spammer, but it is worth the effort. If everyone who received spam did this the spammers would be out of business in no time. There are other things to do as well. If the spammer included a physical mailing address in his message then you can contact your local authorities and they will help you receive monetary compensation. Quite a few companies have had to pay a lot of money to people because of the police following up on complaints.

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