There is currently an abuse of our domain name by spammers. People have been receiving junk mail which falsely identifies some nonexistent RainbowZone.com email address as the sender of the spam message. RainbowZone is most fervently anti-spam and in no way supports and absolutely does not engage in spamming of any sort.
Holy frick, I hate spammers.
What you should do
First thing: never respond to spam. These idiots stay in business by having a tiny percentage of people who get their crap respond to it. What’s a tiny percentage? Think about it: A spammer sends out, say, 2 million garbage messages pushing some stupid drug or site. It costs them practically nothing to send out the messages. If only a teeny, tiny fraction of people respond, say .001% of the people who get the message reply and send them money, that’s 2,000 orders. Say it’s for a $20 piece of crap “cable descrambler” (which they’ll probably never send anyway) – the spammers just made $20 X 2,000 = $40,000. If spam stops being productive, there will be less of it. Don’t click any of the links they offer, don’t visit their site or call their phone numbers. Just delete it and, if your mail program has the function, have it remember this site as “spam”.
Second: Never click a link on a spam email that says something like “To remove yourself from our list, go here”. All you do when you go that route is confirm that your email address is active and then it gets added to even more spammers’ lists and you get more spam. Of course if such a link exists on something you did sign up for but no longer want to get, go ahead and click that link to get off their legitimate list. But if it’s trash mail, not properly addressed to you, resist the urge. Just delete it.
Third: Never assume that the address the spam came from actually sent you spam. Spammers, as in our case and a million other similar situations, simply pick a random, actual website’s address and use it as the “From” entry in their spam. Then that webmaster gets tons of angry emails from people who don’t want spam, their mailbox get stuffed with thousands (not a joke) of bounced mail messages (spammers make up a lot of addresses in the hope their crap gets to someone) saying that so-and-so@such-and-such-dot-com doesn’t exist. Complaining to the faked sites’ server company is usually pointless since their web site’s name was really just picked at random; they actually had NOTHING to do with the spam. Server companies are usually aware of this so now THEY’RE getting messages from angry people about something they had nothing to do with either and cannot “fix” anyway. The damage was done days ago and can’t be un-done.
Fourth: If you want to try and get back at the spammers, you might want to sign up for a service like Spamcop (http://www.spamcop.net). You submit the FULL copy (complete headers and all) of the offending email to them, their script checks the addresses and ports the message passed through, and attempt to figure out where the REAL email originated. This is often some overnight website the spammers picked up or they may have hacked into a real website. Spamcop then attempts to check other instances of this abuse on their database to try and get the servers where this message originated to make their space more hack-proof or, if they suspect the server is actually a spamming warehouse, block them from getting mail through to “good” servers.
Fifth: Never, ever, EVER respond to an email from your/any bank or eBay or PayPal or some such business claiming that there’s been a problem with your account and you need to update your info “or we’ll be forced to close your account”. These are always “spoof” sites that are built to look like the real site by swiping the graphics off the real, original pages. If you happen to get tricked and submit your personal card/banking data, the info you supply simply goes to a crook’s address and they now have enough info to clear out your bank account. This little trick seems to get mostly new people (or older folks) who assume everyone is honest. If you have friends or relatives that are a little “green” be sure to explain to them that they should NEVER follow the links on such emails. Explain to them that banks and other such institutions DO NOT SEND OUT MESSAGES LIKE THAT. A bank that’s having issues with your account will likely send you a letter by regular mail or ask you to come in to visit them at the branch. Another sure tell that you’re looking at a scam email: they’re usually addressed to “Dear subscriber” or some other non-specific term. Your bank knows your name and will ALWAYS address their messages directly to you by name.
Sixth: Turn off your images in your mail program if at all possible. Many spam messages include either the message in a graphic or send along a tiny transparent gif that links back to some counting server. When you open up the message and see it’s junk, it’s too late. The graphic has been pulled off their server and the fact you looked at it has been logged. they now know your address is active and you’ll be getting more crap sent your way.
Some email programs will allow you to keep images unopened in messages that, via filters, the program has earmarked as spam but lets your normal messages display graphics. If you get a real message accidently dropped into the spam pile, you just click a button and the images pop open for just that message. You’ll likely get mail incorrectly marked as “Junk” if the server that sent it is sending to a list of genuine subscribers. So although the automated spam filters help reduce the garbage substantially, if you get a lot of spam (like I do) you’ll want to quickly scan the spam folder to make sure good messages aren’t getting trashed along with the bad. It’s a small inconvenience compared to getting all the crap mail in your normal mailbox(es).
Whatever you do, the real big thing is to not reply in any way to spam garbage, not even to tell them they’re idiots and thieves. Which, of course, they are. Imagine the resources wasted by real companies handling all this garbage and it’s results. Millions of dollars and pounds, yen, francs, etc. are wasted by these creeps. Who do you think pays for that? You, me, your friends. Not the spammers.
Gadzooks, I hate spammers.