All of us get SPAMs all the time and most of us feel frustrated as there is little, we can do to stop it other than marking the email as Junk/SPAM in your email reader (Outlook/Thunderbird/GMail/Hotmail). However, this doesn’t stop the source of SPAM but just moves the message to a Junk folder in your storage – basically you still get the SPAM message. If you are running your own mail server, you pay for the traffic consumed by SPAM which can as high as 70-80% in some cases. Adding to this, some SPAM sources manage to keep sending your Junk mails even if you block it, as they keep changing the source email IDs and servers.
The next step is to get into the hood of the email message and find the source ISP that is used for sending the SPAM and then complain directly to the ISP webmaster. Most of the ISPs take these seriously and shut down when they see number of complaints against a server(s). Doing this though requires good understanding of TCP/IP technologies (method to do this is outlined here) making it out of reach for most users. That’s where this website (SPAMCOP) comes in, SpamCop offers a service (accessible after free registration) to copy ‘n’ paste the SPAM email. Once this is done they analyse the email and deduct the source ISP and then send a complained message automatically to the ISP webmaster.
Recently I posted a complained for a newsletter that I kept getting from a Online Health magazine. The newsletter didn’t have an Unsubscribe link, so I had to send a request email to the sender. Even after a month I continued to get the newsletter. I posted a complained against them in SpamCop and then send them an email saying that I have done this and next step I will directly complain to their ISP. This worked, the next day I got an email from the Marketing Manager saying they have removed my email ID.