RELATED ARTICLES - Reporting Spam

Well known ISP's such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, Orange, BT, etc are always interested in getting a spam or scam report. They will reply to you and let you know of any outcome if their regulations permit. ISP's come in different shapes, sizes and flavours. There are some which provide connectivity around the World, host your domain, provide email facilities, transfer internet requests, and process email. The vast majority are very responsible organisations and will always block somebody who is misbehaving.

There are a few who allow their facilities to be used by anyone for anything. They are slow to respond or don't respond at all to reports of spam originating from their network. They are the ones that are usually blocked by your own ISP, but that takes time. For example, I could set up a Yahoo or BT email address and send spam from it, but my existence would be short lived because they would be on my case within hours. Spammers are unlikely to come from the big ISP's although the email says they do. Scammers may often use legitimate email accounts and then direct you to another email address in their message.

Currently, Internet Service Provider (ISP) will only investigate abuse reports that are found to originate from their own subscribers. That information unfortunately, is not easily available for the average user.

Use the tools below to help you determine the true origin of the sender and run a lookup report with Spamcop.

ISP's usually have an internal email address to report abuse of their network called abuse@[followed by the name of the ISP] so if you want to report spam, then forward your spam email to them at that address (they will also want a copy of the Internet Header to help them find out who sent it). Don't always expect to receive a reply (albeit automated) after you have sent in your spam report.  You might also want to try postmaster@ or info@ .

CAUTION!
If your ISP offers you an option to block IP addresses, then that's great but a word of caution here about blocking IP addresses - you have to be totally (101%) convinced that you have correctly identified a particular IP address as behaving badly because you would not wish to block your own ISP or the IP address of an innocent mail server doing it's job. This would result in you not getting the mail that you should be getting and if you make that mistake often enough and keep adding innocent IP addresses to your blocking list, then nothing at all will get through - meaning, no email whatsoever!