SPAM NOTICE

Attention visitors 

If you have received an email communication which appears to be sent by us but does not relate to some form of electrostatic painting, or the sale of used school lockers; you have probably been the victim of an unscrupulous email spammer.  

Rest assured that any UCE (unsolicited commercial email - also known as SPAM) indicating it came from <someone>@preferred-interiors.com and not bearing a signature, valid header, and telephone contact information did not originate with us. 

Please do not contact us or complain to our ISP until you have
read the balance of the information on this page.  

Recently we have been receiving a number of bounced email transmissions which were not initiated by us, indicating that a spammer has been forging our domain name as part of the "From:" field in their outgoing emails.  While we probably cannot trace and apprehend these individuals, please accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience this reprehensible behavior may have caused you.

Preferred Interiors Enterprises is a legitimate business providing various electrostatic painting services, repair of school lockers, and the sale and installation of used school lockers.  

As a matter of Company policy, Preferred Interiors Enterprises does not send UCE in an attempt to garner further business.   We use email ONLY for the following purposes :

Why would a spammer forge header data?

Spammers maliciously use someone else's valid domain name to forge email header data like the From: and Reply-To: fields in their UCE to hide their true identity.  They know that if they don't; they'll receive a barrage of complaints and their ISP will probably terminate their account.  They're in it only for the money and the last thing they want is to have their mail account shut down.  Unfortunately, email forgery is relatively simple.  Forgery of email header data makes it nearly impossible for the average email recipient to complain or report spam effectively.  If you can't figure out who really sent you the SPAM, you can't get them shut down.    

As the legal owner of a registered domain name, you can't effectively prevent spammers from forging your domain name as part of the email addresses they include in their SPAM; but you can add some measure of authenticity to email sent to addressees involved in legitimate company business while advising others of the ongoing scam involving domain name forgery.

All email correspondence initiated by us will contain our company name, the name of the person initiating the communication, a telephone or FAX contact number, and non-forged header and IP information.

If you receive or have received unsolicited email (other than RFQ's) purporting to be from us; rest assured we did not send it.  

Every email sent over the internet contains information called header data.  Some of that header data can be forged, some of it can't.  Spammers typically forge a large percentage of their header data by forging someone else's legitimate domain name into the FROM: field of their outgoing SPAM emails.  The legitimate domain owner is then flooded with bounced emails from ISPs and complaints from people who received the spam but did not trace it to the actual source using the full email headers. 

If you learn how to read the full header information, the SPAMMER's original IP address will be available to you despite their attempts at forgery.  Most email clients have a 'show full headers' capability.  The Help button in your email software should give you specific information on how to display full header information.  Examine the IP addresses in the header.  You'll likely find that much of the data is forged; but you'll also find that the header data does not point back to us, our ISP, our web host, or our email server.  A great little software product for tracking IP addresses back to their source is SmartWhois offered by TamoSoft, Inc. (www.tamos.com).   If you're unsure how to read or interpret the header data; we encourage you to do a little research by reading a brief tutorial.

1. The prudent thing to do is just delete it.  Replying is pointless as either
   
      (a) the From: address is forged, or 
   
      (b) the From: address will be used to harvest a list of working email
           addresses which the spammer can use to optimize his or her operations.
   
   

2. Try to avoid loading spam in an HTML capable email client which automatically loads images.  Spammers often encode your email address in the URL used to retrieve those images.  By examining their web server logs, they can determine if you received the email, and whether you read it.
   
   

3. For the same reason, don't click on any links in the email. Doing so will only confirm your email address as 'Live prey'!
   
   

4. If you want to do some detective work, look at SamSpade.org, or the UXN Spam combat page, both of which have a collection of online tools for deciphering URLs, tracing website ownership, and researching ISP contact information.  But be careful!  It's all too easy to point the finger at the wrong person.  Spammers try to cover their tracks, and more than one of the email headers will typically be forged.
   
   

5. And obviously, never buy anything from a spammer.  Why would you want to deal with a person who forges emails for a living? 
   
   

6. Boycott the advertised products or companies.  Why would you want to deal with a company that uses such an unscrupulous person to advertise their wares?
   
   

7. Help us stop the offenders by forwarding the unmodified email to us for our examination, tracking, and possible prosecution.