Why was I "spammed" at my MobileMe Mail address?

List-based

Spammers circulate and sell lists of addresses. Once an address is on a list, it may be distributed to many others.

Generated list

Spammers have applications that guess at addresses. The more popular addresses such as first name only, business type usernames made of first initial and last name, and popular nicknames are common guesses.

Signing up for services

Some services sell the email address you give them to other services. If this happens, it is very common to receive spam from several sources.

Disclosure in a public forum

If you've given your email address in a publicly available webpage, it could be copied and used in mass mailings.

There are some basic ways to deal with unwanted messages:

You can turn on Junk Mail on the Mail app and in Webmail. If you turn on junk mail filtering in webmail, you can report messages as spam.

• Contact the mail administrator
Contact the administrator of the domain that sent the spam. It is likely that the actions of the spammer are a violation of the Internet service provider's (ISP) Acceptable Use Policy. Report any spam to MobileMe system administrators by sending the message along with full source headers to spam@me.com. A MobileMe administrator will examine the message and headers. If the message is verified to be spam, that message will be filtered by the server before it reaches your mailbox.

If you contact an administrator, it's important that you obtain the full source headers. Mail programs usually give a short four-line header, but full source headers will be several times this length. If you are using Mail, refer to Mail 3.0 Help to view full source headers. If you are using Microsoft Entourage, you can see full headers by following these steps:

1. While viewing the message, choose Source from the View menu.
2. Copy and paste the text from the new window into a message.
3. Send the message to spam@me.com and to the administrator of the source domain.

If you are using another mail application, you can usually view full headers by choosing an option such as "View Source" or "Show Headers" from the menu bar. The exact location and phrase varies between mail clients. Refer to the application's documentation to learn how to obtain the source headers.

• Rules
  Set up mail rules which are built into your email client. Configure these rules to allow or delete messages based on email address, subject, sender's domain, and other factors.  If you use a mail client other than Mail, refer to the application's documentation to learn how to set up rules.