How to spam the spammer?

[Nigel_O]

I am getting a load of emails from a marketing company trying to sell me data. I don't generally mind un-solicited emails, and I always un-subscribe from anything irrelevant. However, for this company, I have un-subscribed at least a dozen times so far this year, but I'm still getting the emails (usually twice a week)

So far, I've done the following:-

Asked them to stop (getting less polite each time)
Called them (no reply)
Reported the company to the Information Commissioner's Office

I'm considering more "creative" solutions to get the message across - I want to keep it legal, but a taste of their own medicine might help to educate them

Any suggestions?

Moderator edit: no naming & shaming

Edited by jeremyc on Tuesday 29th March 16:54

[Spare tyre]

If everyone replied to scam emails with made up but live looking data, the scammers would have a pain in the arse time sorting out what was nonsense and who the vulnerable were

[anonymous-user]

I'm getting the same and have also been polite, less than polite.

Just added them to my blocked list.

[Willy Nilly]

Put their email address in various online forms, gay porn, other scammers etc.

[Winky151]

What about a rule to auto forward emails from that address to that same email address?

[bitchstewie]

If you're in a business environment block them and move on as life's too short.

Try abuse@ or postmaster@ and you may find a sysadmin who doesn't want to be dealing with that ste.

[rich888]

Nigel_O said:

I am getting a load of emails from a marketing company trying to sell me data. I don't generally mind un-solicited emails, and I always un-subscribe from anything irrelevant. However, for this company, I have un-subscribed at least a dozen times so far this year, but I'm still getting the emails (usually twice a week)

So far, I've done the following:-

Asked them to stop (getting less polite each time)
Called them (no reply)
Reported the company to the Information Commissioner's Office

I'm considering more "creative" solutions to get the message across - I want to keep it legal, but a taste of their own medicine might help to educate them

Any suggestions?

Moderator edit: no naming & shaming

Edited by jeremyc on Tuesday 29th March 16:54

Seems my post I made earlier this afternoon containing publicly viewable contact information by the registrars of the domain for this bunch of spammers was deleted by the moderator.

If you want to contact them, do a whois search on Google for the domain name shown in their email address

[MonTheF1sh]

Last year I was getting flooded by spam (upwards of 50 a day) to my personal account. As it was on my own hosted domain I tried everything with spam filters that I could but most were still getting through.

Closer inspections of the mails showed they were being generated by freshly registered domains that were used for a few days then left to die meaning you couldn't block based on from addresses (which were normally spoofed) or links / images or URL's contained in the emails. After a bit of detective work and a bit of luck, I managed to find the "marketing" company responsible but unfortunately my initial emails were left unanswered. That was until I emailed the owner direct with his full details including where he laid his head at night, pointing out that I'd make it my goal to let everyone in his local area know what sort of business he was actually running.

Took all of 10 minutes to get a response to that one which was an email to his technical guy and also 5 other shell companies that I didn't spot asking them to remove my email from their systems.

After a few days they all but stopped.