I have been following this group for quite a while and I have some observations and advice for those of us who are anti-spam crusaders. Many of us have resorted to complaining to ISPs where spam originates or is bounced from. What we fail to remember, however, is that there is a human being at the other end.

We often fail to think about the person we are sending the email to. Try calling an ISP from whence the spam originated once in a while. Guess what, there's usually real people at the other end who have feelings and often hate spam just as much as you do.

Sometimes I think some of us are as bad as the spammers. Don't fall down to their level.

I have come up with a set of rules that should be applied when replying to spam. These are:

• 1. Keep it short. Tell the person at the other side why you are responding. You can even offer advice, but keep it short. The person at the other end may be getting hundreds or thousands of complaints.

• 2. Keep it civil. It's a real turn-off when you flame the person at the other end. Remember, not everyone is an expert on sendmail, and often ISPs are understaffed. Remember, not everyone is as technically adept as you are.

• 3. Never send replies to the from address unless it closely matches the headers. I won't go into header decoding, since other people have written about this. The from field usually tries to shift the blame to a 3rd party who has no control over the matter and cannot do anything about it.

• 4. Think of how you would feel if you received your own email from some total stranger. Remember, there is likely a human being at the other end who has to read your email.

• 5. Never send email to a spam house. It will not do any good. Instead, use traceroute and whois to find the upstream provider. Send a polite note to them to let them know what their customer is doing. The more complaints they receive, the more they'll think about kicking off the spammer. I have a web-based whois for people who are unlucky enough to not have it on their systems at http://www.doofus.org/spam/whois.html.

The image of us depends on how we write. Right now we're winning. Cyberpromo is basically dead, or close to it. Quantcom and Nancynet are in about the same shape. We need to keep our emails civilized and to the point. We don't need bad press from spammers claiming we're raving lunatics and showing email they received as proof.

Notes to ISPs:

• Follow-up responses to complaints are appreciated. It makes us feel good that we killed another spammer. Even auto-generated responses are better than nothing, since we know our complaint didn't fall into a bit-bucket. Notes saying that the account has been terminated are even better. Better yet, make a post to news.admin.net-abuse.email for all to see. If you kill accounts frequently you can do what Earthlink is now doing and make weekly reports of canceled accounts.

• Disabling relaying off of your servers from unauthorized users is also a good thing. It will help prevent you from receiving lots of nastygrams and bounced email. Upgrading sendmail is a good start.

• Subscribing to Vixie Enterprises RBL (Real-time Black List) can greatly reduce your spam load. There's no reason not to use it.