Have Realistic Expectations
It is important to have realistic expectations when complaining about Spam, so as not to become disillusioned or disheartened when your efforts don't appear to be paying off.
1) Spammers lie, and they're mostly sleaze. These are the guys that used to wander around ripping off old ladies for unnecessary roof repairs. Don't ever expect to educate or reform a spammer into not spamming.
2) ISPs mostly care, but think of it from their point of view. Even the best-intentioned ISP can't terminate an account over one complaint. For starters, figuring out which customer sent the Spam can take a while. The headers you send them only show the modem the user was on when the Spam was sent. It doesn't necessarily show when the Spam was sent, however. The time stamps are put in by intermediary servers, which the ISP doesn't control, so can't tell what time the server think it really is. ISPs get buried under abuse complains. It takes a while to get to yours.
3) ISPs take longer to terminate more expensive services. ISPs need to make money. The customers who buy web-hosting and fast Internet connections will take longer to nuke than those using $20/month dial-up accounts. This is unfortunate, but an ongoing fact of life.
4) Some ISPs like making money off spammers. At the time of this writing, Bell South, Sprint, UUnet/WorldCom, PSINet, AT&T, and Above.net, at least, are generally believed to have so-called Pink Contracts in place with Spamhausen, whereby the ISP charges more than the usual dollars per month for the connection in exchange for ignoring Spam complaints. While we don't suggest you give these ISPs any slack (on the contrary, we recommend general boycotts of any ISP known to be supporting spammers), you have to realize that it will take much time, many complaints, and organized blocking/firewalling/boycotting of these ISPs before they change their minds.
5) Larger ISPs will rarely respond directly to your abuse complaints, even when they terminate the spammers involved.
6) 5 years from now, there will still be Spam coming into your mailbox. Fighting Spam will prevent the volume from rising too high or making your E-mail useless. If you spend time fighting Spam, you can at least take comfort that you are helping preserve the usefulness of the Internet for yourself and others, even if you are fighting a never-ending battle.
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