8 MAR, 2002 - 2205 CST One thing you all might want to do that will eventually reduce the glut of "URGENT" financial offers coming out of Africa by way of Yahoo, is to start forwarding these messages to "abuse.net". When enough of these messages pile up there, various ISPs and backbone service providers for the Internet start leaning on (in this case) Yahoo to clean up its act. If nothing happens, Yahoo then starts losing Internet connections to various other ISPs, etc. When Yahoo's legitimate clients start losing the ability to send email to Aunt Jane, they start raising hell - and the problem gets fixed. This is not an overnight fix, but it does work. About three years ago UU.Net was the bad boy when it came to propagating SPAM and they ignored complaints and inquiries. But when their customers starting losing their ability to communicate with portions of the Internet, UU.Net got religion and started going after their spammers. I think I have seen less than five SPAM messages since then that have originated within UU.Net. At least they don't show up in the message headers. And MSN.com almost got black-balled about two years ago. If you want to participate in this effort, please do the following: 1. Expand the SPAM message so that all of the header information is displayed on your screen. 2. Copy the entire expanded message to a blank email message screen. 3. Address the message to (in this case): "yahoo.com@abuse.net" 4. Place the word "SPAM:" in the subject line followed with the subject of the message you are forwarding. 5. Send the message. You may receive a reply from "abuse.net" asking that you agree to not send out any SPAM before they will accept your messages. I agreed to this requirement over three years ago. You might also ask your friends to do the same thing. The more yahoo-originated SPAM messages received by abuse.net, the faster will be the axe. 73 - Dick, W9GIG