Summary: Services exist which will take your spam and promise to do something with it to help reduce spam. We'll look at whether they're worth using.
Does it really do any good to forward spam emails to SpamCop, Knujon or the FTC? Or am I wasting my time? Can they really do anything to stop spammers?
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Yes and no.
I really wish I could give you a definitive yes or no, but sadly the situation just isn't that simple.
Let's look at where spam originates, and what these services might, or might not be able to do about it.
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Spam is more than an annoyance, it's a battle. For every step you and I and our email providers take to stop or block spam, spammers come up with new tricks and techniques to bypass those steps. As the recipient of a fair amount of spam - perhaps more than most, since I have several "public" email addresses - I definitely see the magnitude of the problem.
Yet, aside from hitting the "this is junk/spam" button in an email client, I've never once reported spam to an agency like the FTC or a service like those you've listed. In my opinion, it's not really worth the effort any more.
In the past, the majority of spam came from specific servers that were either owned by, or had been compromised by spammers. These servers would then send out millions of email messages: spam.
But the fact that the email all came from consistent places - the servers involved - meant that it was also possible to track them down, and depending on where they were located, shut them down or block them.
That's where most of these services come into play. By forwarding spam to them you're helping them identify individual sources of large amounts of spam. The services can then track down the owner, or the owner's ISP, and have the spammer shut down. If they can't, they can instead add the IP address of that server to a "black list", which other ISPs can then use to block that server.
This approach is becoming less and less effective.
Why?
Botnets.
Botnets, created by installing malware on hundreds of thousands if not millions of computers world wide, are starting to take the place of individual mail servers for spam sending purposes. Rather than sending 10,000,000 emails from one server, a spammer might now be sending 100 mails each from a botnet of 100,000 infected machines - perhaps even yours, if you're infected.
100,000 machines is an impractical number of machines to track down. (I'm just pulling the numbers out of the air, but the order of magnitude should be about right, if not somewhat understating the problem.)
As a result, the reporting services you're asking about have little to do, and can't really help.
Before I write them off completely, though, I do have to add that some - in particular the FTC I would think - may do more than just track down servers and IP addresses. The FTC (The U.S. Federal Trade Commission) may also look at the content of the message and see if what's being hawked violated federal law. With enough instances of an issue, I would hope they'd go after the merchant. Even then, because of the way that so many of these scams are distributed among various spammers, often overseas where the FTC has no jurisdiction, it's a nearly insurmountable job.
And of course some spammers are still using individual servers.
So the bottom line is that forwarding spam to these services may help, and it may not, depending on the spam and the service.
As I said, I don't bother. I have two reasons for that:
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I believe that, especially with botnets doing most of the spamming, it's not really worth the effort.
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To the extent that might be worth it, I have faith that there are others forwarding their spam.
I simply choose not to.
The good news is that it doesn't really hurt to do so, it's just your time spent.
Personally, I'd rather use that time to answer a few more questions.
Related:
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What's a botnet? Or zombie? And how do I protect myself from whatever it is? Botnets are implicated in the increase in spam in recent months. Bad news: many are infected and part of the problem. Good news: it's easy to avoid.
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Why is there so much spam? Even though most of us might never fall for it the reason there's so much spam is quite simple: spam works.
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How do I get rid of all this spam?!?! Spam is getting worse, there's no question. What can you do about it? There's no magic answer, but there are various thing you can do to help.
Article C3812 - July 17, 2009
Leo, I often look at the "properties" of the email, then at the LAST "Received" line and from that line grab the number (e.g. 8.14.3/8.14.3) and enter that at http://www.geektools.com/whois.php to find an email address to which to report the spam. Then forward the email to that address (+ others) and copy the entire "Properties" into the forwarded email.
22-Jul-2009
Posted by: Ken Laninga at July 21, 2009 9:08 AM
Reporting spam or even Phishing scams for that matter appears to be a waste of time. A most thankless job at the best of times because the "victims" meaning the websites in whose name the info is sought, say the banks, paypal or federal sites which are the targets hardly care and they never acknowledge the effort you make to report it to them. May be we should not expect thanks?
Posted by: M.B.Nataraj at July 21, 2009 7:36 PMOn the subject of reporting spam I, too, when I have time to spare use the headers to trace the originating ISP and report the offender for infringing their Terms of Use. More often then not Yahoo! and Hotmail actually do something about it and close the account. Google, on the other hand, appear totally disinterested and has never, to the best of my knowledge, closed a gmail, or googlemail, e-mail account.
Posted by: Bill Chubb at July 21, 2009 11:51 PMMany years ago trying to get rid of spam I used the included unsubscribe process. Found it's a waste of time. Now I leave the spam filters to do their job. I learned to live with spam.
Posted by: Eddie Santiago at July 25, 2009 5:58 AMhello, I send my spam to the FTC and various other reporting sites. I, myself have been wondering whether it really works or not. I have had a friend tell me that it will work somewhat, but not all that much. If it works somewhat, why can't that be increased to much more? Also, if spammers are getting better, aren't the good guys "getting better" too or does that not really apply to them?
Posted by: Robert at August 8, 2009 4:40 PMIt is really annoying that companies that call themselves names such as for example Natively Services, where it isn't possible to be deleted from their spamming list, even though nobody even signed up to them in the first place, continue to pollute people's in boxes with their poo poo, one has to ask oneself whether the problem is simply the choice of e-mail provider or not.
Posted by: Christopher Alexander at November 19, 2009 7:42 AM