Make Love Not Spam campaign

Lycos Europe launched a screen saver that will constantly request data from sites run or advertised by spammers.

The idea being that it will bump up the bandwidth (traffic) charges for the spammers or make their web sites slow and unresponsive.

Although at first glance this seem like fighting back at spammers and incurring 'them' additional cost it is not to be recommended because:

1. If the spammers are selling illegal products / services there is a good chance that they are using stolen credit card details - so it will not cost them at all!

2. Most ISP's host multiple sites on a single server - so hitting their site could severely impact other sites that were innocently hosted on the same server or network.

3. Using the screen saver may be illegal or against the Acceptable Usage Policy of many ISP's because it is similar to a DDos (distributed denial of service) attack.

So we would not recommend it - instead tell all your friends / colleagues to visit: http://www.spamhelp.co.uk for all the best anti-spam advice!

Don't use internet profiles

Some sites allow you to enter a personal 'profile' about yourself - including your email address which is then 'public'.

Our advice is not to bother and if you have to use a secondary email address.

Spammers get prison sentence

A brother and sister 'spamming duo' have been convicted of sending hundreds of thousands of unsolicited e-mail messages to AOL subscribers.

The jury in Virginia recommended that the man (Jeremy Jaynes) serve 9 years in prison and that his sister (Jessica DeGroot) be fined $7,500. They were convicted under a State Law prohibiting the sending of bulk email using fake addresses.

Prosecutors had originally asked for 15 years in jail for Jaynes, and a jail term for his sister!