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Re: junk mail such as American Airlines Net SAAver Fares



[lots of people wrote lots of things back to the Executor mailing
list about the Net SAAver Fares jun kmail.  A response is off-topic,
but hopefully it will allow us to avoid inappropriate postings in
the future, and has been pre-approved by melissa@ardi.com.]

The proper way to handle mail of this sort is to send a polite note
to the user explaining that the posting is inappropriate.   If you
think it was intentional, mail the postmaster at that site (just
replace the user name with 'postmaster', ie, if you were having
problems with someuser@arsc.edu, it'd be postmaster@arsc.edu) and
cc the troublesome user.

If it appears that this is one of those one-machine domains and
that the postmaster is unlikely to be sympathetic (the machine only
exists to send other people junk mail), then you may also want to
cc the Internet Service Provider (ISP) that provides the person
with their link.   You can find this information out with a 'whois'
command (Ie, 'whois amrcorp.com' for example).

Your letter should look something like this:

> Please inform your users that crossposting ads to completely
> unrelated newsgroups and mailing lists is a really bad idea.
> Feel free to ask me if you don't understand why.
>
> In this case, comp.emulators.mac.executor and EXECUTOR@ardi.com
> are definitely not related to airline ticket prices.

Be polite.  Many times, the person doesn't know that what he is
doing is inappropriate.  Explain what happened, where it happened,
and why it shouldn't have happened.  Include a complete copy of
the original message, including all mail headers.

Remember that it does no good to also post a reply back to the
original news group or mailing list since people who post junk mail
inappropriately are almost never on the mailing list or reading
the newsgroup.  All this does is cause people to become annoyed
with you as well.

Most people administrating systems do not like junk mail any more
than you do, and you'll generally get a response back as soon as
the person reads it.  In this case, I got a very polite and
action-oriented message back from the postmaster at amrcorp.com
who planned to not only take care of the current problem, but take
steps to avoid any future problems like this one.

> Mike,
>
> Apparently someone subscribed EXECUTOR@ARDI.COM to the AA NetSAAver
> mailing list, so it wasn't exactly a crossposting. I have removed the
> EXECUTOR@ARDI.COM address from the list.  I completely agree with you
> about crossposting.  In an attempt to avoid similar episodes in the
> future I will try to convince the marketing folks that they need to add
> some "DO NOT REDISTRIBUTE OR CROSSPOST" text to the outgoing list
> messages and the subscription notification messages.  If something bad
> happens and you get any NetSAAver messages distributed to you
> inappropriately, please send me an e-mail and I'll do what I can to fix it.
>
> Keith

Happy ending.  Problem solved.  Everyone benefits!  For more
information on this topic, check out the FAQ in in the newsgroup
news.admin.net-abuse.announce or see
<http://www.cybernothing.org/faqs/net-abuse-faq.html.

If you have any followups to this message, please send them to
either myself or news.admin.net-abuse.misc, but definitely not to
the mailing list.

Thanks
---
Mike Kienenberger               Arctic Region Supercomputing Center
Systems Analyst                 (907) 474-6842
mkienenb@arsc.edu		<http://www.arsc.edu