• PC World
• » Security

2. Snitch therapy.

For most people, spam is mildly annoying, but to ISPs and network administrators, it's a major problem. All that spam hogs a tremendous amount of bandwidth, hardware resources, and labor hours. If you'd like to help stop spam at its source, you can take action in various ways. Before you do anything else, report spammers to your ISP.

AOL subscribers can forward all junk mail (with an AOL domain name) to screen name TOSEmail1. If the spam comes from a non-AOL account, forward the message to TOSSpam. If you get a message with a suspicious-looking file attachment or an inappropriate graphic, forward the entire e-mail TOSFiles.

For additional info, go to keyword Spam, select Junk Mail Tips, and then click Report Junk Mail.

Second, report the spammers to the ISP that generated the spam. To do this, you need to examine the junk mail's header information to determine the ISP domain name from which the spam originated. Then you should contact the postmaster and ask the ISP to restrict the spammer's access to the servers. This can be a complicated process. For the nitty gritty, check out "Tracking Spammers."

Last, you can get in touch with organizations like the Mail Abuse Prevention System and SpamCop to reduce your spam.

And finally, the Number One way to manage spam:

• See more like this:
• spam,
• spam tips,
• prevent spam,
• AOL,
• mail controls,
• filter e-mail,
• junk mail