I got a lot of spam from some email addresses. I am thinking about sending some junk to such addresses just to "get even".

This is an extremely bad idea. Please be aware of the following facts:

• Without the full email envelope available for email routing info verification, we are unable to do anything anyways. Just because you "think" somebody spammed you may or may not be what's really happening. Joe-jobbing is often done by spammers (i.e. spammers "revenge" a spam reporting party by faking the email address of such a party in their subsequent spamming activities, in an effort to "tarnish" and to harass the real owner of the email address.) Joe-jobbing is a surprisingly simple process. See the AZC online FAQ: "I received a lot complaints from parties who were spammed by spammers who use my domain names in their junk mail. Do you have any advice?"

Even if you "think" you have the "original spam" that bears the suspecting email address in its header and/or message body, don't immediately jump to the conclusion that you really got spammed by the true owner of the email address.

The Internet email system by design has no built-in sender identity verification mechanism. So, even with the aformentioned full envelope available, you still can not be 100% sure that a message is "really" sent out by the true address owner.

So far, the only sure way to ensure nobody can forge an email address is to use cryptography based software tools such as GnuPG in your email communicaton routinely, and make sure your secret keys are never compromised!

• In addition, fighting spam with spam itself is illegal, see the "AZC.COM Email Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) or Spam Policy for pointers to the spam related laws of various States, including that of California's.

We value the business from our hosting customers, but we also would like to make it clear that as long as our services are used, no spam or no spamtising can be sent to anybody, period. They are useless and a waste of your, and others', time. The bottomline: just don't do it.

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