You're pissing into the wind, Amy. I get at least three of these a week, purportedly from various banks around the world. Along with the dozens claiming to be someone on facebook behaving badly, classmates reunion notices, offers for viagra, fake shoes, fake watches, etc. And that's not counting the hundreds per week that actually get trapped in the spam filter.

All of it. I mean ALL of it, is phishing. Either trying to direct you to a website that steals info, or to one that pushes some kind of bot onto your computer.

Don't waste your energy on forwarding them. Nobody can stop them. Just delete them. We aren't gonna win this battle until Russia and China get disconnected from the internet.

The spammer is likely to have forged the "From:" address.

Whoever is at the LLCool Kit address probably has no idea what you are talking about.

Amy -

I can send you an e-mail that looks for all the world like it came from your e-mail address. Even if you look at the SMTP headers, you would be hard pressed to tell that it didn't originate from an AOL address.

No offense intended, but what you and other non-geeks need to understand is that the internet was developed by eggheads for eggheads. We all trusted each other, so there was no security built into the system. SMTP is an ancient protocol, and it has no authentication or verification built in to the standard. Sure, there have been updates to it over the years, but since compliance is always voluntary, you're not gonna get there from here.

The best we can hope for is to find some way to stop the botnets from running. Getting people on Windows 7, Linux, or Snow Leopard (next OSX) will go a long way in that regard.

I get spam from an email address that appears to be my own work email. It was really bad a few months ago; I was getting at least 10 a day, and my boss was getting a few per day, too. Anyhow, I knew they hadn't actually hacked my email... they just were somehow able to make it appear that the Viagra/Fake Rolex ads were coming from my address.

Personally, I don't have a problem with cruel and unusual punishment. I think that people that do this shit should have their fingers lopped off, or perhaps be annoyed to the point of insanity by being tied up and forced to listen to "Mmmm Bop" 24/7, while on LSD.

With brian on this one.

We average 500 "Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender" e-mails just from the dead letter system in SMTP. That's just the ones that make back through the filters.

On a very good day -- our inbound and all valid outbound email is about a 5500 e-mails. Which gets us to about 5% and change. If you knock off the outbound, we don't break 4%.

I can send you the stats -- but with some research the stats across the internet put it at Ninety-Six Percent of all e-mail is spam. It has become a matter of "Why bother." Get a gmail account, and hit the "Report Spam" on the small percentage that makes it to your inbox.

> Get a gmail account, and hit
> the "Report Spam" on the small
> percentage that makes it
> to your inbox.

Word. Gmail is brilliant. I get maybe two spams a month. If they've trapped anything incorrectly, I haven't found out. For this alone, Sergey and Larry deserve their airplanes.