babbage's Journal: the [e-mail] meme

I just realized that, although [e-mail] is a pretty well known "official" spam sink, I can't actually find any official sounding site that supports the notion that forwarding spam there actually does any good. After poking around on Google for a few minutes, I can't find anything more substantial than anecdotes about people sending spam there.

One thread on SpamCop's mailing list suggested that reports sent to that address were being bounced, and another page I found suggested that messages are accumulated there but that nothing seems to happen with them. Following a .gov link from one of the pages Google found, I found the transcript for some kind of congressional hearings on spam, but no mention of that address came up in there. That was as close as I could get to an "official" source of information.

So. Where did this meme come from? Does the government actually advertise the existance of this address anywhere? Do they do anything with messages delivered to that account? Or is it just a Sendmail alias to /dev/null? I was thinking of adding [e-mail] to my standard spam reporting routine, but if they don't do anything with reports then what's the point?

Found something more substantial

[babbage]

www.ftc.gov/spam [ftc.gov] (the url label is the one the FTC distributes or whatever, and the version in the href field is where you get redirected to when you open that link -- I'm just saving you a step here...). Nice use of proletarian imagery on the FTC site there :)

Re:Found something more substantial

[GGardner]

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/new s/editorial/4963501.htm

This article in the San Jose Mercury Times claims the FTC gets 75k spams a day forwarded to them. It also claims that the FTC reached "settlements" with over 150 spammers -- sure would be interesting what those settlements amount to.

I'm not quite sure what they do with all their spams the get -- I don't have any idea how you'd go about sorting or prioritizing such a mess.