I am NOT a spammer!

I probably hate spam as much as you, maybe even more as I receive well over 100 pieces of junk e-mail every day. I never send spam e-mails. It seems that in my anti-spam efforts I have infuriated one of the Internet's low-life scum. They are retaliating by using random e-mail names from my domain, brucekelley.com, as the "From:" address in many of the spam e-mails they flood the Internet with. Most of these are classic pump & dump scams advertising how you can become rich by buying over-the-counter penny stock in whatever pathetic company they are promoting this week. Don't fall for it! They just want you to buy it so the price will rise and they can sell for a profit.

How do spammers make it look like the e-mail comes from me? It is actually very, very easy. The e-mail protocols, as they have historically been implemented, provide no mechanism to verify that the name of the sender is correct and honest. You can put anything you like in there and send e-mail that appears to come from anyone in the world. Spammers take advantage of this as one part of their attempts to remain anonymous and avoid prosecution for fraud. There are efforts afoot to change the e-mail protocols to prevent this spoofing, but it will be a long time before they are in use by everyone.

If you have come here, you are probably wondering how to do something about spam. I recommend the web service SpamCop (www.spamcop.net) which has tools to parse the headers in a spam message to determine where it really came from and to report the abuse to the Internet Service Provider responsible. Reporting may not reduce the amount of spam in your inbox but it is a good thing to do for the Internet as a whole.

-- Bruce Kelley