| br!ghtshark |

>> This is article number one in a series of three, being, this article, “Getting some info together” and “Template to use for a company selling your details to spammers“.

The amount of spam from South African companies seem to be getting more and more… br!ghtshark has been starting to reply to these spam messages, using the following template (developed in conjunction with johannschwella):

Dear XXX, [The name of the person can be found via the domain name records, doing a google search or by visiting the company's website]

Thank you so much for the free spam email advertising your business “business name” (email below).

Please remove me from your ALL of you mailing lists with immediate effect (including and not limited to any or all information you have about me). I categorically state that I have never requested any emails from XXX never heard of them and have never given permission for XXX to contact me.

In this regard, I refer to the ECT Act of 2002:Electronic Communications and Transactions Act. 2002

Chapter VII – Consumer Protection

45. Unsolicited goods, services or communications

(Section 45 of the ECT Act)

1) Any person who sends unsolicited commercial communications

to consumers, must provide the consumer

a) with the option to cancel his or her subscription to the

mailing list of that person; and

b) with the identifying particulars of the source from which

that person obtained the consumer’s personal information, on request

of the consumer.

As such, in terms of section 45(1)(b), I would like to formally request the source from which my details was obtained. The full act can be obtained here: http://www.acts.co.za/ect_act/index.htm.

Failure to provide me with such information in terms of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act, is an offense punishable by a fine or imprisonment of up to 12 months, as per the act (section 45(4) read with section 89(1)), and will be reported to the South African Police Service as such.

Sincerely,

YOUR NAME HERE

For good measure, also find the email’s message information by right clicking on the email in your Outlook inbox, selecting “Message Options” and then copying the Internet Headers section of the message. In these headers you will also many a time find a section with “X-AntiAbuse:” where you will find details of where to report the spam to as well – most service providors will blacklist a subscriber which repeatedly receive such complaints. Paste a copy of the entire message header in to your reply to the company and CC the anti-abuse contact email to the mail as well. If the email was sent using a recognised email providor such as hotmail, gmail, webmail, etc, you can assume that the abuse email address is “abuse@” (ie, abuse@hotmail.com, abuse@webmail.co.za, abuse@gmail.com, abuse@yahoo.com, etc – you get the picture).

Most spammers won’t reply, but sometimes you will receive replys of confirmation that your address has been removed from their database. Sometimes you will be so lucky as to receive a reply from a company, telling you where they got your contact details from. If this happens to you, have a look at my other “Spam Busting” post.