So You've Got a SPAM Problem...

Photo by Hannes Johnson on Unsplash

A few months ago, I started getting A LOT of SPAM email.

This was not of the normal variety, offering me pills to enhance various performances (not karaoke performances of “I Was Made for Loving You” by KISS, it turns out), requests from “Nigerian Princes” (god forbid an actual Nigerian prince get in some kind of trouble and have to email people to get out of a jam, NOBODY is going to believe you!), and, of course, the 5 daily Dominos emails.

Dominos, and, what the hell, I’ll namecheck a few others: Duluth Trading, Famous Footwear, Redbubble, Etsy, eBay, and any number of indie publishers—I understand the concepts of marketing and why you do what you do, but, seriously, 5 emails a day? Duluth Trading, I’m not purchasing pants 5 times per day. I’m not purchasing pants ONCE per day. I feel like your demographic purchases pants specifically in the hopes that they will never have to purchase pants again.

Let me offer you all some alternative advice. If you send me 5 emails in one day, I am 100% unsubscribing from your list. I don’t care if I am fucking in love with your products, I don’t need that many reminders, you’re clogging up my shit with your shit, and it’s too obnoxious to ignore.

However, if you were to send me one email, say, every 2 weeks, and if that email was actually a pretty good deal, even if it was a deal I wasn’t particularly interested in, I would be inclined to stay on your list. Because deleting that amount of email isn’t more annoying than unsubscribing, AND I’d think, “Well, this particular deal isn’t for me, but the level of deal is something I don’t want to miss when, eventually, it IS applicable to something I want.”

Okay, back to the program.

I was getting 15-25 emails every day from various “newsletters” that were all about the same sorts of things: Biden being stupid/old and investment advice that was sure to make me rich in no time.

Lest you think this is political, I’m CERTAIN there’s also plenty of Trump is a Fool emails to be crammed in one’s spamhole as well. I just happen to receive this flavor bombardment, but I think insane email marketing that defies all logic is the territory of ALL politics.

I don’t know how I tripped into this rabbit hole, I don’t avail myself of investing info, like, ever, and my level of political thought is, “Interesting, I feel like there’s a correlation between having an anime-related bumper sticker and a Democratic party sticker of some kind…” [a fact that I find interesting and amusing on a cultural level and as a fan of manga myself]

Whatever the origin, whatever the purpose, I was getting a SHITLOAD of SPAM email on the daily.

The Unsubscribe did nothing. Because every time I unsubscribed, I just got a set of “new” email newsletters from “new” sources. The more I unsubscribed, the worse the problem seemed to get. I read several Reddit rumors along the lines of “Unsubscribes do nothing, they just send you MORE stuff because you’re engaging with what they’ve sent you!” And that kind of seemed to be true. Technically, though I was unsubscribed from Email Newsletter A, I might now be signed up for Email Newsletter B, C, and, what the hell, Y.

It was a bit like whack-a-mole with filters as well because every couple days, the originating email addresses turned over and there was a whole new set.

After suffering this issue for a few weeks, and after taking a few days off and returning to hundreds of garbage emails, I decided to dedicate some time to fixing the problem for real.

I commenced Operation You Don’t Know How Much Time I’m Willing To Dedicate To This, Spammers!

I’m posting it here in hopes that it might help someone else, someday, who is fighting the same battle. This feels like a librarian-y thing, and it gets even more so in a few paragraphs.

Damn, is this like a recipe post where someone tells an overly long story before getting to the point? Did I just do a technology version of that? I am so sorry, guys. If you’ve scrolled down to here, no worries, go forth!

Step 1: Prepare to Gather Info

The first thing you want to do is to gather as much information as possible on the companies sending you these SPAM emails. So let’s talk about what to gather and how, and then we’ll get into how you can use it.

Before you start, you will need as many of the spam emails as possible. I would think somewhere around 20 is a good, round number, and it should cover your bases pretty well. Preferably, you need emails that came from different addresses or claiming to be from different sources, and fresher is better.

First, create document with a few lists. You could also do this in a spreadsheet, if that’s your jam. That’d be the smart way to do it. That’s not the way I did it, but it IS the smart way.

Column 1: Email address the email comes from

Column 2: LLC name.

Column 3: LLC physical address.

Column 4: LLC Listing

Column 5: Web URL for the mailing entity (usually this is a crappy, one-page website).

Column 6: Web host

Column 7: IP Addresses for LLCs

How do you get this info?

Well, Part 1 is probably pretty easy, right?

As for Parts 2 through 7…

Step 2: LLCs and Physical Addresses

A lot of times, email newsletters will have a business listing in the email footer. This is usually an LLC and an address. They are technically required to do so.

If you can’t find the LLC name and/or address there, I was usually successful in finding the business info by clicking on the unsubscribe link, then using the root of the URL to access the company web page. So, if you click Unsubscribe and it takes you to www.ScamGarbageCrap.com/managepreferences, you just slice off everything after .com to get to the regular address.

As a caution: be very careful about clicking links, and absolutely do not input anything into any fields if you do. If you can, check these links on something like a library computer or other device that is NOT logged into all your stuff, just to be safe.

I discovered pretty quickly that all of the emails I got were coming from one of two places: Event Horizon LLC and one other, something like Eagle Publications LLC or some crap like that. Grey Eagle? Not-Quite-Bald-But-Swerving-Hard-That-Direction Eagle?

Step 3: LLCs

Column 4 of your spreadsheet should be a link to the LLC listing. These are state-by-state, and most states make it pretty easy to look up an LLC and find the address for the LLCs registration, an officer, and some contact info.

You’ll want to look up the LLC in the state where it’s located to find its registration. This is usually some really terrible looking website run by the state, find-able by searching “[state name] business entity search.

Here’s Colorado’s, to give you something to work from: https://www.sos.state.co.us/biz/BusinessEntityCriteriaExt.do

This will usually give you an agent name and an address, at the very least. TIP: The address here should match the address in the email newsletter footer! But we’ll come back to that.

Step 4: Web Hosting

For this part, you take the URL for the business, and head over to https://www.whois.com/whois/, paste in the URL, and then you’ll get some information.

Sometimes it will show you the actual person/entity who owns the domain, and that can be helpful, but sometimes that info is blocked. However, you can always find the hosting company, and this is incredibly useful.

In my case, I found ALL the sites Event Horizon was using were being hosted by the same company. What a shock!

You can also often see the IP addresses, so keep those as well, we’ll use them shortly.

Reporting Phase 1: Reporting to the FTC

Sending SPAM email of this type IS illegal, so we’ll start by reporting these folks here: https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/assistant

You’ll notice there are different categories for reporting, and I don’t know that some are taken more seriously than others, but, hey, if someone is using what appears to be a fake address for a business, they are impersonating a business.

Do this for each different email address sending you stuff. Fill it out as completely and as honestly as you can.

Reporting Phase 2: Reporting to the Better Business Bureau

Here: https://www.bbb.org/file-a-complaint

I mostly selected the scam/fraud option. This is where the LLC information is most important. Report all the LLCs you’ve turned up. These are registered businesses, and sometimes the BBB can do things to make life a little more difficult for scammers.

Reporting Phase 3: Reporting to the Web Hosts

This is probably my biggest stroke of genius (other than what followed naming my schwanz “Genius”) because the web hosts do take some responsibility for what’s happening under their umbrella, so if someone is making dozens of scam sites that are all linked, the host may blacklist the IPs completely, which really throws a wrench in a spammers’ plans.

I went to the hosting company’s website, found an email address and let them know what was going on, which URLs were being used, and let them know that they were already being reported to the FTC, BBB, and that I was pretty sure the ways these sites were being used was in violation of the hosting terms and conditions.

I also went ahead and added the IP addresses as well.

Reporting Phase 4: Reporting to Legitimate Address Holders

Might not apply in all cases, but in mine I was able to find that the addresses the spammers were using sometimes belonged to legitimate businesses. I sent those businesses and government entities emails letting them know that this was happening. I told the business owners I was reporting the frauds where I could, and that them doing so, as the legitimate property owner, may be taken more seriously and help stop the frauds from using their address. I may have added something only mildly alarming about how, left unchecked, this sort of fraudulent activity that appeared to originate from their address could become a problem down the road if that address was linked to lots of fraudulent activity.

The Final Phase: The email

Possibly the cruelest step, I sent, to ALL the email addresses I could find, including the ones I received newsletters from, ones I found at the websites, ones I found through the registry, and others, the following email:

I am emailing all of you because I’m certain you’re under the same umbrella, most often under the name Event Horizon, LLC.

Most, if not all, of your practices are in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act, and I will be reporting all emails I receive from here forward to the authorities.

I will be reporting all of your URLs to Namecheap [the hosting service] as sources of abuse. You are in violation of their policies, and I know all of your URLs are brokered by them.

URLs Being Reported to Namecheap: [listed here]

I will be reporting all of your emails to the FTC: [email addresses]

I will be reporting all of your business entities to the BBB: [list of LLCs]

I will be reporting your use of the following fraudulent addresses: [all addresses I could find were fakes]

…here’s the cruel part: I THREATENED to report all these things if the emails didn’t stop, but in truth, I was threatening to do things I’d already done.

Did It Work?

Unequivocally yes.

Now, I don’t know WHICH part worked, but the emails stopped promptly and have not resumed. It was definitely a shotgun approach, and the only problem with a shotgun approach is that you don’t know how to replicated it again other than to break out that same shotgun and use the other barrel.

My suspicion is that the company wiped me from their database because I was clearly going to cause them more problems than I was going to solve. I wasn’t about to…actually, I don’t even really know what it was they wanted me to do. Learn how to invest money or something?

Anyway, I was going to create issues for them, and I wasn’t going to buy anything, clearly I knew this was bullshit, so the smart move on their part was to just stop communicating with me in hopes that I wouldn’t end up reporting them.

It reminded me of something I read, that someone who was tired of getting junk mail would take any postage-paid envelopes addressed to senders of junk, and instead of putting in an order form, fill the envelopes with sand or sheet metal, making them as heavy as possible and costing the companies quite a little chunk of change.

Sending this dude envelopes was not going to earn them a customer, and it was going to cost them money. Because he had the time and spite to help shape the world into a marginally better place. At least, “the world” that consisted of his mailbox.

If you’re having this problem and don’t have 4 hours of Spite Time (I always build this into my schedule, Spite Projects are very satisfying), you could just send the email to the various addresses and hope for the best, see if it works. I think it might!

Buuut I kinda wanted to stop my emails, and while I was at it, figured maybe I could stop some other people from getting them as well.

It’s possible that some of these steps are unnecessary or unhelpful, but it’s also possible that the lengths to which I went impressed upon whichever parties acted on this to see clearly that sending me spam emails was more trouble than it was worth.

It’s also possible that all of these different tactics did something and contributed to the overall success.

Whatever the case, here’s my recommendation:

Set aside an hour or two to get rid of those spam emails that just won’t stop. Using the power of information!