Complain to the ISP hosting any click-through, indirectly Spamvertised web sites
A favourite trick of spammers is to send their Spam out from a throwaway account on one ISP. This Spam directs recipients to URLs which are hosted on another ISP. Hosting these websites (or E-mail drop-boxes) is considered by the community to be providing a Spam support service. Spammers cannot be allowed to profit from their Spam, even if they get tossed from their dial account.
Some spammers are even smarter. They'll setup a Geocities or Freeyellow account, and put up a simple web page. They'll advertise this page via Spam. However, this page performs an HTTP Redirect or has links on it to the spammer's real web page, or pages.
In this case, look at the web site advertised in the Spam. Save a copy of it locally if you can. Find the click-through or redirect URLs in this page by looking at the source HTML in your browser's Compose feature or any text editor. Complain about these URLs,
Most responsible ISPs now forbid their customers from sending Spam by any means. If you find a URL in a Spam, decipher it if necessary, and use traceroute, whois for TCP/IP addresses and whois for Domain Names to find the contacts for the ISP hosting the web site.
Forward the entire Spam, including all of the headers, and a copy of the click-through page, to the contact addresses for the ISP, along with a brief message along the lines of:
To: abuse@ispdomain.net,additional_addresses From: your_address Subject: Spam - [subject line of forwarded message] Attention isp_name, I have received the following Unsolicited Commercial E-mail, or Spam. I have never subscribed to a mailing list or asked for E-mail solicitations from this sender. This message solicits me to visit the URL at: url_here This page, as I found it at the time of receiving this Spam, is attached to this E-mail. You can see that this page clicks-through (or redirects) to the URL at: clickthrough_url_here I believe this URL points to a web site hosted on your network. Hopefully, your Acceptable Use Policy forbids the sending of Spam and the advertising of URLs or other resources on your network. Please terminate connectivity to this web site as soon as possible to prevent the spammer profiting from their actions. Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter. --- > forwarded Spam > ...
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