Don't take it personally

Sometimes the content of junk mail can make you wonder if you have been personally targeted in some way. Regardless of its content, it is at least 99.9999% certain that a junk mail message is not directed at you personally. Your address just happens to be on a list that the junk mail sender has obtained.

Depending on the source of addresses, they may contain more than just mail addresses. They may also contain "real name" information, such as is found in the headers of mail or Usenet messages. This information may then be used to personalise messages, similar to the way paper junk mail can be personalised using mail merge packages. So the presence of your name in the text of a junk mail message means nothing; you have certainly not been targeted personally.

Sometimes junk mail contains phrases designed to make it look as though it has been carefully targeted. Some typical language:

• "Our research indicates you might be interested..."
• "You were referred to me as someone who may be interested..."
• "After seeing some of your newsgroup postings, it seems you might be interested..."
• "You are an entrepreneur. We know that from our database. We believe you might therefore be interested..."

This is all bogus. Don't believe anything a junk mail message tells you.

Don't Reply

Never reply to junk mail.

Often, junk mail will be written so as to appear to be apologetic for intruding on your mailbox, and will say that replying to the message, or mailing a specified address, will get you taken off their list. This looks responsible, but is almost always nonsense. Sending replies back will generally cause one of the following results:

• The reply address is bogus or blocked. Your message will be immediately returned to you as undeliverable. You will have wasted your time.

• The reply address names a host that doesn't accept incoming mail, because they don't want to be flooded by replies or by error messages generated from their mass mailing. Your message will sit about in the local mail queues for some days, and finally will be returned to you as undeliverable. You will have wasted your time.

• The reply address works, and your message is delivered to a program that extracts your mail address and adds it to a new address list that the junk mailer is constructing. This new list is composed of addresses that are now known to be valid. Expect more junk mail to be directed towards you.

Don't hit out in the wrong direction

Mail headers are easily forged. The addresses in them may be valid, and may actually belong to the person who sent the junk mail, but then again they may not. Much junk mail is constructed in such a way as to attempt to make it difficult to figure out where it came from and who to complain to. A careful reading of all the mail headers, especially the Received: headers, is necessary to determine where the mail came from.

Even if you can figure out the domain the mail came from, complaining to the postmaster there may be a waste of time. The machine the mail came from may actually be run by the people who did the junk mailing. Then you have to figure out who their network provider is and complain to them. Even then, some network providers don't really care or are too overworked to do anything about it.

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