“All I did was complain to the right people. If everyone did that, we could solve the problem,” says spam vigilante Dewey Coffman. Get into the game: individuals can help both those who spend months putting together lawsuits against spammers and those who block their messages in the here and now. For the former, forward spam to the Federal Trade Commission “refrigerator” at spam@uce.gov. But for more immediate gratification, you can sign up to report spam that will be blocked by SpamCop at www.spamcop.net. And if you get phished – that is, you get a polite e-mail that appears to be from a well-known financial institution saying that it needs your personal information to, say, verify its databases or increase its security – send it to the Anti-Phishing Working Group: Instructions are at www.antiphishing.org. (Because some tracking information is lost when you forward an e-mail, both SpamCop and the APWG require you to do some dragging and dropping, rather than just forwarding e-mails along.)
This article appears in February 4 • 2005.