The same goes for spam. While there are organizations -- like The SpamCon Foundation -- that promote methods to fight spam, users are, by and large, left to their own devices, short of filing a lawsuit against a spammer.

Certain states have passed laws that let you sue for each piece of spam received, if your mail server happens to reside in that state. But legislation likely will never prevent spammers from finding and exploiting open mail relays.

Many believe there is nothing to be done about spam or minor cracking attempts other than to pass additional legislation making punishment more severe for spammers and script kiddies. But I've seen real, measurable results from my own small struggle -- call it a microcampaign, if you will -- against Internet abuse.

Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail

By far, my favorite user-level tools for fighting spam -- in contrast to fighting spam at the server level -- are SpamCop.net, a Web-based spam reporting system, and SpamDeputy, an add-in for Microsoft Outlook that also runs as a standalone application for Netscape Messenger and Eudora.

Reporting a spammer to the originating ISP by the traditional method is slow. It typically involves looking through the mail header and doing some DNS research to find the upstream hosting admin or the abuse department at the upstream network provider. Once you've done the research, you then forward the spam to the appropriate abuse departments.

While the manual process sometimes works fine, a minute is too much time to spend regularly reporting spam. And when you send reports manually, you have no guarantee that the upstream provider is not intentionally facilitating spammers, which could mean that the e-mail address you use to report the spam will be captured and used in the next mass mailing.

Automating the Process

SpamCop, in addition to protecting your identity, automates the entire spam-reporting process. You simply copy the spam's body and header into the SpamCop system and it will parse the entire e-mail, sending nonverbose messages to the relevant upstream sysadmins and, hopefully, getting the spammer's ISP and "spamvertising" hosting accounts canceled. (continued...)

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