Anti-spam advice

ANTI-spam advice and references
Spam is usually divided into email-spam and newsgroup-spam. Since you are here you are probably concerned about email-spam. But the newsgroups can affect your email.
Avoiding spam
Most spammers seem to gather addresses from web pages and newsgroups. The most methodical offenders use a program to do this, and simply collect addresses from newsgroup headers, or from searching the body of the webpage for the keyword "mailto:"
So if you have a web site or just one web page, try to not put your email address on it, or put it on as plain-text rather than as a "mailto:" link.
If you post to newsgroups the chances of your being spammed in email increases with the number of your posts. Some email software will allow you to alter your "from:" header to deter spammers. For instance instead of tom@aol.com you could post as tomnospam@aol.com and then include your real email address in the body of the post if you want to receive legitimate replies.
Most email spam only gets sent once. Just ignoring the spam message usually is enough to prevent more messages from that source if it is commercial email. Usually, when they say to tell them if you don't want anymore and they'll stop, it's a lie. Often when you send a "please remove" message, the spammer will stop sending you email, but will sell your address to other spammers.
While there is a law that requires spammers to remove you from their mailing list if you request it, the spam may be coming from a server located outside the jurisdiction of that law, and it is very difficult for you to determine that. The sexual harassers and neurotics in general are another matter. Currently the most effective way to deal with spammers is to notify their service provider. Of course, the spammer can always subscribe to another service provider and start the cycle of spamming, getting caught, and getting barred all over again.
The best place to start is at the alt.spam FAQ (see below), some of the information at these web sites overlap but it tends to be reliable. These references are far from a complete listing, but they are probably more than enough to start with.
- Ruth

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I found most of my information from the newsgroups:
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Cancelling spam in newsgroups:
Cancel-bots are programs that are sent out to search for specific abusive postings and cancel them from all servers in the Usenet chain. This is a controversial practice in itself, but is most often done by news administrators who are accepted by the community.
Another mechanism is the news.admin.net-abuse hierarchy of newsgroups:

news.admin.net-abuse.bulletins
news.admin.net-abuse.email
news.admin.net-abuse.misc
This contains complaints about offensive posts and spams, comments, warnings, and advise on how to handle offensive postings. It is also where news administrators and ISPs often post explanations of how they have dealt with an offensive posting and sometimes apologies for the postings.
news.admin.net-abuse.policy
news.admin.net-abuse.sightings
The "sightings" group contains announcements of postings which have been canceled by a cancelbot with detailed information about the offending post.
news.admin.net-abuse.usenet
All these newsgroups are VERY active, so if your newsreader can retrieve just the most recent 10 to 50 postings, it's the way to go. There can easily be a few hundred messages a day in these groups.
Usenet maintains an archive of its FAQs, which exist for many of the newsgroups, including the news.admin groups. These archives are mirrored at many sites around the world but the primary archive site is at M.I.T.

alt.spam FAQ
at either http://digital.net/~gandalf/spamfaq.html
or http://ddi.digital.net/~gandalf/spamfaq.html
this FAQ includes information on
- how to trace the source of a posting or email
- how to complain to the appropriate person/ISP
- revenge - do's and don'ts
Skirvin's page of n.a.n-a. documents:
http://valor.obscurity.net/~tskirvin/nana/
FAQ on cancelling messages and using cancel-bots
at http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/tskirvin/faqs/cancel.html
The CancelMoose pages
at http://www.cm.org
FAQ for the newsgroup hierarchy news.admin.net-abuse
at http://www.cybernothing.org/faqs/net-abuse-faq.html

Other individuals occasionally post advice in newsgroups on dealing with spammers. Their advice ranges from childish to very useful.
You can also go to the MIT archive site and search for the FAQs of the news.admin groups. The directory is rather large so be prepared for a little work finding what you need.
FAQs (copies from the news.answers newsgroup at ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/net-abuse-faq/
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Other spam related resources:

The SPAM TOOLS page:
http://www.blighty.com/spam/
The Netizen's Guide to Spam, Abuse, and Internet Advertising--
http://com.primenet.com/spamking/
The Net Advertisers Blacklist--
http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/BL/blacklist.html
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If this was not enough, here are even more anti-spam links.
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this page last updated June 01, 1999