Step Three speaks to scams, and the fact that mail service providers, ranging from the venerable (Microsoft Hotmail/Live/MSN, AOL, Yahoo, Google/Gmail, Earthlink, and others) don’t respond with any haste– if at all– to requests to attend to close obvious fraud accounts.

For years, I’ve been receiving tons of spam that contain 419/lotto/phish fraud messages. Dutifully, I’ve sent email messages to the host email domain regarding each and every one of these messages. It’s clear that fraudsters understand that the email service providers are slow to close down accounts that are opened to receive replies to 419/lotto/phish messages.

Worse, so many email service providers simply do nothing with requests. I suspect that there might be but one or two employees total that are ‘burdened’ with examining accounts for evidence of fraud upon request. If each email service provider were required to examine fraud account closure requests quickly, then these emails would go away, and the fraud behind the emails would be stanched quickly, and one hopes effectively.

What would this require? The answer is to have major email account providers that will be willing to pay support personnel on a 24/7/365 basis to answer fraudulent account closure requests quickly.

Traditionally, one complains about spam (fraudulent or otherwise) to abuse@. That’s where I’ve sent my complaints– except that these days, many providers want complaints sent to a special mailbox, such as Microsoft’s report-spam@hotmail.com. Other accounts at the hosting mail service provider may also respond, such as the old traditional postmaster@, or even majordomo@.

But some email service providers (and large ones at that) don’t even respond at all. There is no place to complain to, and these providers are therefore poor citizens of the Internet (163.com– are you listening?). More on them tomorrow.