Junk Mail or Spam

what is spam?

• reconstituted meat made famous by the Monty Python spam song.

• the nasty habit of junk-emailing large numbers of recipients with irrelevant and pointless mail.

what forms does spam come in?

There are two main types of spam, and they have different effects on Internet users.

• Usenet spam
  Cancellable Usenet spam is a single message sent to 20 or more Usenet newsgroups. Usenet spam robs users of the utility of the newsgroups by overwhelming them with a barrage of advertising or other irrelevant posts. Usenet spam stops system administrators and owners of newsgroups from managing the topics they accept on their systems.
• email spam
  Email Spam targets individual users with direct mail messages. Email spam lists are often created by scanning Usenet postings, stealing Internet mailing lists, or searching the Web for addresses. Email spams typically costs the subscriber money firstly in phone bills then on top of that, it costs money for ISPs and online services to transmit spam, and these costs are transmitted directly to subscribers.

how do I deal with spam?

• do not reply!
  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 receiving responses from people to whom they've send messages. Whenever possible, they use trial accounts. So the return address probably doesn't exist (and the mail will just get bounced back to you). Bear in mind also, replying confirms to the sender that this is a "live" account and may result in a deluge of further mail.

• contact the postmaster
  Forward the full posting and header to the appropriate postmaster. Ultimately, the only way to stop the spammers is to report them to their service providers and hope that the service provider will terminate their account.

how do I find the appropriate postmaster?

• From
  If the From field looks forged ignore it!
• domain
  Look at the last two domain names in the path and try putting postmaster@ or help@ in front of these to form an e-mail address. If this e-mail address is incorrect, try altering the domain names slightly. For example, instead of using the domain pavilion.co.uk, try pavilion.net. Alternatively, click here to discover alternate strategies.

what is pavilion doing to stop spam?

Pavilion currently implements measures to reduce spamming. On the Pavilion newsgroups anti-spam software removes on average 60,000 items of spam per day!

Pavilion have also implemented an outbound anti-spam policy; we do not allow not outside users to relay mail through the Pavilion mail servers. This means that we can provide you with a faster service and you do not have to bear the cost of spammers who are not customers of Pavilion Internet plc. However, this measure will affect those subscribers who also connect to the Internet via a connection other than their Pavilion Internet. So for example, if you intend to travel, or connect through a work place connection which is not dialling into Pavilion Internet, you may experience difficulties sending mail but not recieving. Please contact technical support if you are experiencing this kind of difficulty.

Comments and suggestions to webmaster@pavilion.net