MainSleaze

That depends on who you are, how much you know about email and spam, and how much control you have over your email. Fortunately the source of mainsleaze spam is at least not obscured, so you do not have to be familiar with email headers or the technical details of mail servers to determine who sent the spam to you and where you should complain. Here are a few suggestions:

• All users. All users can avoid doing business online with the companies mentioned here. If you must do business online with the company, avoid giving them your email address. When you cannot avoid giving an email address out, create a backup address at a free webmail provider such as GMail or Yahoo, and give that instead of your normal email address. You can then finish whatever business you have with the company, secure in the knowledge that any spam that they send won’t appear in your normal inbox.

• Power users. Users who understand email headers and know how to configure their spam filters can configure them to delete the spams reported here. (The “Spam Report” blogs on this site provide the actual headers of the spam to allow you to configure spam filters and write filtering rules.) You can also complain to both the company and the ESP, especially if the spammed email address is a personal email address and you want it removed from the list/suppressed by the ESP. Some ESPs don’t care about spam, but many ESPs do not allow spam and take complaints seriously.

• Mail administrators. People who manage mail servers for themselves or other users can configure their mail servers to reject any unsolicited bulk email that they wish. Since mainsleaze spam is sent from known IPs and uses known domain names, blocking it is easy if you are willing to sacrifice any legitimate email from the same source. Personal and small company mail servers might not mind blocking marketing email from sources that send spam, even if some of the email is requested. ESPs and companies usually segregate bulk marketing email from non-bulk email and transactional email, using different mail servers for different types of email. So you are unlikely to block anything important.