It has come to our attention that our domain name and e-mail addresses have recently been appropriated by sinister and unknown persons who have used them to "spoof" spam e-mail. Spoofing means doctoring the header information on the e-mail message to make it appear to come from somewhere other than the true source. Unfortunately, this is extremely easy to do, and there is currently no truely effective defense against it.
Please rest assured that abgoodwin.com respects your privacy. We never send unsolicited bulk e-mail of any kind.
If you have received e-mail which appears to come from this domain and...
then the message did not originate from us.
Caution! If you have received spoofed e-mail, do not open any attachments to it, as they are highly likely to contain a computer virus. Assurances within the message that said attachments have been checked by an anti-virus program are lies.
If anyone at abgoodwin.com does send you a legitimate attachment, the message containing the attachment will include a PGP digital signature to authenticate that the message did indeed come from us. We suggest that you verify the signature before opening the attachment.
PGP is an easy to use encryption and digital signature program which is available free for individual private use. We highly recommend getting it and using it to protect yourself against fraud and privacy invasion. Get PGP now.
We believe in the Internet as an open and self-policing community. Such a community requires its members to act in a responsible manner. Our blood boils when we think of the cowardly and malicious individuals who are spoiling this community for the rest of us. If you spam, shame on you! If you know a spammer, please try to talk sense to them or, if that fails, report the spammer to the proper authorities.
That said, an open community also requires that its members take appropriate precautions to protect themselves against abuse. We highly recommend that you learn as much as possible about the issues involved in privacy and safety on the Internet. To this end we have included a number of links to help you to educate yourself.
If an e-mail address or domain name is findable on the web, it can be harvested and used by "black hats." We have taken what precautions we can to make harvesting this information more difficult, but it is still possible.
While the spoofed headers of an e-mail message can be separated from the real ones and the real header can be traced, spammers change IP addresses frequently, so following spam back to the source generally leads to a dead end.
It might be possible to impose a system on the Internet which would end this type of abuse by registering and tracking every piece of hardware connected to the network, and indeed, such plans are in the works. However, we at abgoodwin.com believe that this type of plan will curtail the freedoms of honest folks, lead to institutional abuse, and fail to effectively control the problem. Criminals will always find a way to circumvent new obstacles to their intent.
The Network Abuse Clearinghouse is intended to help the Internet community to report and control network abuse and abusive users.
SpamCop.net was started in 1998 and remains a premier spam reporting service.
SpamAbuse.org helps you report and punish spammers for sending you their junk e-mail.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) was created to defend our rights to think, speak, and share our ideas, thoughts, and needs using new technologies, such as the Internet and the World Wide Web. EFF is the first to identify threats to our basic rights online and to advocate on behalf of free expression in the digital age.
The Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG) investigates tools and techniques to mitigate the effects of spam. The focus of the ASRG is on technology solutions, although it may consider tools and techniques to aid the implementation of legal and other non-technical anti-spam measures.
The CERT® Coordination Center (CERT/CC) is a center of Internet security expertise, located at the Software Engineering Institute, a federally funded research and development center operated by Carnegie Mellon University.
Introduction to Public-Key Cryptography, provided by the Netscape developer website, introduces the basic concepts of public-key cryptography.
PGP Corporation develops secure-messaging and information-storage solutions used by thousands of corporate and millions of individual users worldwide to protect their confidential, sensitive, and proprietary information.