Last updated 6 March 1999
You've probably arrived at this page because you've received some form of bulk email and want to know what to do. We're not likely to answer all your questions or concerns here. We hope this document will help you understand the problem, and let you know that we've likely to already have seen the latest message you got.
We published an article on
What is Spam? Spam is a lunch meat produced by the Hormel company. Much to their chagrin (we expect) the name of their product has also become associated with bulk email.
The term Spam was originally used to describe a practice on Usenet. Unscrupulous or just plain clueless people would post messages to many newsgroups without any regard to the relevance of said message to any particular group. The term has since been extended to cover any large scale posting or email activity. It is often used by people to signify any message which they did not wish to receive, or any message which they find offensive, but to postmsters on the Internet and in this article, "spam" refers to large-scale mailings of the unsolicted email.
For now we'll restrict the discussion to commercial bulk email.
It shouldn't be surprising that commercial interests have discovered marketing possibilities in email. Think of it, millions of people in an electronically captive audience and they're no further away than a large mailing list and some software. The cost is attractive too; much cheaper than direct mail, television, or radio campaigns.
They harvest addresses from postings on Usenet (did you know you can buy CDROMs with all the postings for a given period of time?), by looking at mailing list archives which are freely available via servers all over the Internet, and sometimes just take guesses on addresses. Sending email to the list of common names at a large ISP (such as AOL) or an institution of any given size is sure to reach many people. Web pages with "mailto" tags are also a popular way to harvest email addresses to put on lists, and search engines make this all the easier.
Many pieces of bulk email have tag lines offering to help:
It's reasonable to be unhappy about the sheer volume of material pouring into our mailboxes. The quantity of junk email we receive is sometimes in serious competition with legitimate correspondence. Wanting to fight back the evil scourge is a natural reaction.
In the context of many of the arguments against bulk email, the urge to fight back isn't necessarily the most effective thing to do.
The primary argument against bulk email is the amount of time it takes away from legitimate pursuits. Starting from there, it doesn't seem to make sense to spend all that time sending email to every postmaster in the forwarding chain of the message you got.
It's also often difficult to determine the actual origin of an email message. Increasingly, not only are the sender and recipient information in the message forged, but some for the intervening headers are sometimes forged as well. Even with access to the log information from the MIT mail servers it's often difficult to determine the true origin of an email message.
There are numerous programs available on the Internet for "complaining" about unsolicited email. We recommend that you not use any of these, because they all complain to addresses that appear in header lines which, as we have just said, can be forged. Using any of these programs basically puts you, the annoyed reader, in the position of sending spam to multiple, probably invalid or inappropriate addresses on the Internet. These programs are spam multipliers, so please do not use them.
Sending complaints without accurate information and a thorough understanding of what the data means does in fact waste your time and the time of the people who receive your message.
You really want to complain. OK, but make sure your complaint is useful. Here are some heuristics:
Make certain you send us the full headers along with the message. Without that information, it's a waste of time to send us anything.
We don't advocate you start sending out messages to the postmaster at every site you think you see recorded in the headers. Rather, send us one copy, regardless of how many copies you received.
Don't know how to get the full headers to show? It's a cinch someone else will so delete the message and go on with more important things.
If you've got the header things worked out and it's still pretty soon after you got the message (see When to Complain, above), send email to postmaster@mit.edu with a brief sentence indicating you read this bulk email page, and include a copy of the message.
Note: 'postmaster@mit.edu' is the appropriate address to complain to for people who receive their mail at an "mit.edu" address. If you receive mail anywhere else, you should complain to the postmaster or other appropriate party at your ISP.
Another common type of nuisance email is the chain letter. This takes the form of a message which exhorts you to send copies of itself to ten or more of your (soon to be former) best friends. It sometimes threatens bad fortune if you fail to follow it's instructions, so called `breaking the chain.'
These are easily identified, usually by the long list of forwarding headers indicating that there are a lot naive people in the world.
Yet other versions of this species purport to be able to bring you fame, fortune, and riches beyond belief. All this just by forwarding a bogus pyramid scheme to as many people as possible. These border somewhere between commercial bulk email and the wrong side of the law. Sometimes the schemes are blatantly illegal.
Our advice: don't think about it, don't read very far into it, don't waste your time. Above all, don't forward it. Just delete it.
Harassment isn't funny. If you get harassing or threatening email or mail bombed (many messages directed to you in a very short period of time), you should tell someone about it right away. Contact MIT Stopit and provide them with whatever information you have, along with a representative copy of the correspondence. Someone will get in touch with you for any needed information so save all the harassing email, and in the case of a mail bomb of many messages, save a representative sample of that correspondance.
Harassment by electronic means is no more acceptable than by any other means and is not tolerated at MIT. Visit this document on Dealing with Harassment at MIT for more information and where to go for help with harassment issues.
Last updated 6 March 1999