Women Writers, and its sister site Domestic Goddesses, DOES NOT support or use SPAM. SPAM is unsolictied junk mail attempting to sell you something (from a product to a so-called "charity" service). However, some SPAMMERS will use forged addresses in their spam so it looks like it came from someone else. Recently, someone received a letter that looked like it was forwarded from us that was NOT, and we learned that a spammer was doing their dirty work using us as a "front." We promise never to send you any unsolicited email, or to forward any junk chain letters, etc. If you're not sure what SPAM is, check out the Anti Spam Page at Abuse.net.

Most spam doesn't come from the place listed in the From header. You need to show all headers to see the real origin. See you mailer's documentation for help on how to do that. If you receive an email from someone that LOOKS like it came from womenwriters.net, please report the abuse immediately by forwarding the offending email to [email protected]. Please include all mailing headers. If you don't know what I'm talking about, here is a clip from a great site called www.abuse.net (which I suggest you look at for more information on how to stop spam.)

To find out where the spam originates, tell your mail reader to display all the headers and look at the "Received" lines. Then read the Received lines from top to bottom. For example:

To: [email protected]
Received: from relay.yoyolink.net (ns2.yoyo.com [127.10.58.3]) by legit.com with SMTP id WAA12684 for <[email protected]>; Thu, 21 Nov 1996 22:28:08 -0800
Received: from forged.example.com (slime.spammer.com [10.71.84.44]) by relay.yoyolink.net (8.8.3/8.8.3) with SMTP id GAA02044 for <[email protected]>; Fri, 22 Nov 1996 01:23:46 -0500

Your own site (legit.com) got this message from ns2.yoyo.com, which in turn got it from slime.spammer.com. Intermediate sites, such as yoyo.com in this example, may simply be sites which allow anyone to forward mail using their mailer. Don't assume they are connected with the spammer or the spammer's provider, but you might want to let them know their system is being used for this purpose. You can ignore all the stuff about with and id and so on.

With experience, and/or by consulting various sources, you will learn more about Received lines, and the ways that they can vary. But the basic principle is still to read them from top to bottom, and to understand that each computer which handled the message added one or more Receieved lines. Thus each Received line may originate from your site, the spammer's site, or somewhere in between.

If you send this to me, I'll need all of these headers in order to report the bad spammer who is using my address.

If you're not sure how to do this, please send me a note and I'll give you more details.

Also, if you ARE a spammer, be forewarned-- if you use Womenwriters.net as a forged header WE WILL SUE YOU under the U.S. junk FAX law.

Kim Wells
Editor, Webmaster