"I'm Nice" Method

 This tactic involves attempting to contact the system administrators of the offending site and requesting/demanding that they take actions to insure that you will not receive any more junk mail from their site.

Step 1: Identify the responsible parties

 Often the email is sent to you from a different location than their web site. I usually attempt to contact the administrator's at both sites. You can tell what machine sent the mail by examining the mail headers.

Return-Path: highlander@prysm.net
Received: from ns2.prysm.net by [my site] with SMTP
(1.38.193.4/16.2) id AA18777; Wed, 21 Aug 1996 10:21:07 -0700
Received: from min01-1.prysm.net (min01-1.prysm.net [207.16.245.40]) by ns2.prysm.net (8.6.12/8.6.9) with SMTP id EAA10389; Wed, 21 Aug 1996 04:57:57 -0500
Message-Id: <199608210957.EAA10389@ns2.prysm.net>
Comments: Authenticated sender is <highlander@prysm.net>
From: "Nikola" <none@prysm.net>
 To: highlander@prysm.net
Date: Mon, 19 Aug 1996 04:58:29 +0000
Subject: 10 Cents a Minute Long Distance, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week!!
Reply-To: none@prysm.net
Return-Receipt-To: none@prysm.net
Figure 1: Mail Headers
Don't look at the return address to figure out where the mail came from. They can easily make both the username and the sitename up. Most of the time, the sitename is legitmate and the email address is either bogus or is an auto-responder that will send you more mail you don't want to read.

In this case it looks like highlander@prysm.net sent the mail and tried to make it look like it came from none@prysm.net (Nikola). While you can verify that highlander@prysm.net is a valid email address, you never know whether it is the email address of the offending spammer, his name for the mailing list, or whether it is some sort of auto-responder. Sometimes, there is only one way to find out...

Errors-To: homebiz@flock.MWCI.NET
Received: from crc3.concentric.net (ip114.cleveland.oh.interramp.com [38.11.118.114])
by darius.cris.com (8.7.5)
id AAA17807; Fri, 26 Jul 1996 00:45:22 -0400 (EDT)
Comments: Authenticated sender is <phantom9@pop3.concentric.net>
From: "Eddie Davidson" <homebiz@flock.MWCI.NET>
 To: joe545@aol.com
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 00:47:14 +0000
Subject: ~~FLOODGATE~~
Reply-to: massemail@aol.com
Figure 2: Mail Header
This guy was selling an email spammer + mailing list of 2,000,000 people. What I did here was see if I could figure out "Eddie's" email address. It looked like he was coming from flock.MWCI.NET so I took a couple guesses and figured out his email address by telneting to his mail port

Step 2: Complain

 Since you are being nice, you should limit your complaints to the sender or the system administrator of the site. In the first example these would be:

I recommend forwarding them the piece of offending mail and including something like this at the top:

To whom it may concern,

Please alert me that you have received this email and then remove the following email addresses from your mailing list:

your@address
your@other.address
etc.

If you don't receive a response from this, then you may want to consider the Annoyed Method.
Last modified Sept 2, 1996