Many people are not aware that, when they receive abusive or offensive e-mails, they can report it to the company which hosts the e-mail account. Finding out where to make the report can be tricky. Today I needed to report an abusive mail from a Yahoo mail account. If you type “report abuse yahoo mail” into a search engine you are likely to arrive at a page which list links to other pages. I went through this process which was frustrating and seemed to go nowhere before finally finding this page which has a link to contact Yahoo Customer Care. That link takes you to a form where you can fill out information about the offending e-mail.
To make the report you also have to copy the full headers of the offending mail. This itself can be tricky and is not that obvious with most mail clients. For Mozilla Thunderbird I had to select View -> Message Source from the menu. The hosting company needs the full header information to be able to determine exactly who sent the message, when it was sent, and other details to affirm its veracity.
As far as I know, if the mail is extremely offensive or abusive the hosting company will shut down the account. Most hosting companies take offensive and abusive e-mails very seriously and do not screw around. So if you report such a mail it is likely that the account will be cancelled, an appropriate action and a strong signal to the sender that such action is inappropriate and intolerable.
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