Report Spam From Outlook

Why is spam so destructive?

• The free ride. E-mail spam is unique in that the receiver pays so much more for it than the sender does and it pays to report spam from Outlook. There are numerous spam filters and blockers out there, and you can read the outlook 2003 spam blocker review. For example, AOL has said that they were getting 1.8 million spasm from Cyber Promotions a day until they got a court injunction to stop it. Assuming that it takes the typical AOL user only 10 seconds to show and discard a message, that's still 5,000 hours a day of connect time a day spent discarding their spam, just on AOL.

By contrast, the spammer probably has a T1 line that costs him about $100/day. No other kind of advertising costs the advertiser so little, and the recipient so much. There are some spam blockers that can report spam from Outlook and it is essential to complete the outlook spam filter registration. The closest analogy I can think of would be auto-dialing junk phone calls to cellular users (in the US, cell phone users pay to get and start calls); you can imagine how favorably that might be got.

• The "universe of spam" problem. Many spam messages say "please send a REMOVE message to get off our list." Outlook express spam blocking can find and eliminate these false messages. Even disregarding the question of why you should have to do anything to get off a list you never asked to join, this becomes completely impossible if the volume grows. Now, most of us only get a few spam messages a day, which you can report spam from Outlook and by some outlook express spam blockers. But imagine if only 1/10 of 1 % of the users on the Internet decided to send out spam at a moderate rate of 100,000 a day, a rate easily achievable with a dial-up account and a PC. Then everyone would be getting 100 spam messages every day.

If 1% of users were spamming at that rate, we'd all be getting 1,000 spam messages a day. Is it reasonable to ask people to send out 100 "remove" messages a day? Hardly. If spam grows, it will crowd our mailboxes to the point that they're not useful for real mail. Users on AOL, which has much trouble with internal spammers, tell that they're already nearing this point. Our goal is to be spam free in outlook.

• The stealing of resources. An increasing number of spammers, such as Quantum Communications, send most or all their mail by way of innocent intermediate systems, to avoid blocks that many systems have placed against mail coming directly from the spammers' systems. (Due to a historical quirk, most mail systems on the Internet will deliver mail to anyone, not just their own users.) How to block spam with outlook? You can use a good spam trapper for outlook and there are even free outlook spam killers out there. This fills the intermediate systems' networks and disks with unwanted spam messages, takes up their managers' time dealing with all the undeliverable spam messages, and subjects them to complaints from recipients who conclude that since the intermediate system delivered the mail, they must be in league with the spammers.

Many other spammers use "hit and run" spamming in which they get a trial dial-up account at an Internet provider for a few days, send tens of thousands of messages, then abandon the account (unless the provider notices what they're doing and cancels it first), leaving the unsuspecting provider to clean the mess. Reporting spam from Outlook in this situation can be of little effect. Many spammers have done this tens or dozens of times, forcing the providers to waste staff time both on the cleanup and on watching their trial accounts for abuse.

• It's all junk. The spam messages I've seen have almost without exception advertised stuff that's worthless, deceptive, and partly or entirely fraudulent and need to be reported from Outlook. (I include the many MLMs in here, although the MLMS rarely understand why there's no such thing as a good MLM.) It's spam software, funky miracle cures, off-brand computer parts, vaguely described get rich quick schemes, dial-a-porn, and so on downhill from there unless you have implemented spam stopping in outlook express. It's all stuff that's too cruddy to be worth advertising in any medium where they'd have to pay the cost of the ads. Also, since the cost of spamming is so low, there's no point in targeting your ads, when for the same low price you can send the ads to everyone, increasing the noise level the rest of us have to deal with.

• They're crooks. Spam software invariably comes with a list of names falsely claimed to be of people who've said they want to get ads, but consisting of unwilling victims culled at random from Usenet or mailing lists. However, with some newer spam filters on the market, you can report spam from Outlook. Spam software often promises to run on a provider's system in a way designed to be hard for the provider to detect so they can't tell what the spammer is doing. Spam messages invariably say they'll remove names if you ask, but they almost never do. Indeed, people tell that when they send a test "remove" request from a newly created account, they usually start to get spam at that address.

Spammers know that people don't want to hear from them, and generally put fake return addresses on their messages so that they don't have to bear the cost of getting responses from people to whom they've send messages. Whenever possible, they use the "disposable" trial ISP accounts mentioned above so the ISP bears the cost of cleaning after them. I could go on, but you get the idea. It's hard to think of another line of business where the general ethical level is so low.

• It might be illegal. Some kinds of spam are illegal in some countries on the Internet. Especially with pornography, mere possession of such material can be enough to put the recipient in jail. In the United States, child pornography is highly illegal and we've already seen spammed child porn offers. Having spam protection for outlook express can minimize these types of emails.

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