Teaching Spammers a Lesson!

On a daily basis my personal GMail account is full of newsletters and email ‘updates’ that I never signed up for, from companies that I’ve never even heard of. I try moving them to spam but that isn’t always permanent. Of course there is no ‘unsubscribe’ button and contacting them seems not to have any effect. So what can I do?

I can report them to the government, to their host and even their domain registrar for spamming, and typically that is a fine course of action. However, the effects are not immediate – what do we do until they’re stopped? Well, if you use GMail or another email service that offers filters, I developed a rather creative idea…

We’re going to make it so that every time they try and spam you, they end up spamming themselves. Let’s look at how to do this using GMail Filters:

Step One: Go into Settings and click Filters:

Step Two: Put the spammer’s “from” address in the From: box located on the filters page. Click ‘test search’ if you have any recent mail from them in your account to ensure you’ve done it properly. Then click ‘next step’.

Step Three: You can either use their “reply-to” address, the “from” address, or if you really want to be effective, you’ll find a customer support or billing address on their website. Put this e-mail into the “Forward it to:” box. Now whenever they spam you, it will automatically be forwarded back at them and then deleted! (Note: You can create multiple filters and have the spam forwarded to all of those addresses!)

Now you’ll never have to see their spam and eventually they’ll have to either create a filter to block you from e-mailing them or remove you from their list. One way or another, you are going to inconvenience them like they inconvenienced you, and you’ll never have to see their spam again! Truly, justice has been served.