Offensive E-Mails

www.hotline.ie is a service which handles reports of Child Pornography on the Internet which are illegal under the 1998 Child Pornography and Trafficking Act. If the material you report to them at report@hotline.ie turns out to be confirmed child pornography, action will be taken and the Gardaí will assist as appropriate.

Unfortunately there is very little which can be done about Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE) including Adult UCE. The following is some background advice on Adult UCE.

First of all, in 99.9% of the cases the email headers are forged and sending a reply to them is only sending a UCE from you to the unfortunate person whose email addresses was forged and only upsets an innocent party.

Secondly, in cases where they give you an email address to "opt-out" of the list, in many cases these are also false or are used to confirm that the email they sent originally is from a valid and active email address so we also recommend that you do not respond to this unless the organisation is from a recognised organisation which is unlikely.

Thirdly, in some cases they give you a website to access and remove yourself from the list but when you access this website you will be exposed to adult pornography and your details will be logged on the site for accessing that site. Sometimes, this is what they wanted in the first place as it helps to generate traffic on their website. Often it is impossible to remove your name from the email list.

However, it is possible to determine from which location (not which user, nor which address) on the Internet the email was sent. If you are able to look at the email headers you will be able to determine the IP address of the (internet service provider) ISP who allowed the email to be sent. It is sometimes possible to send an email to the abuse@isp address to complain about the email. However, adult emails are not illegal in many jurisdictions including Ireland.

IF you do succeed in sending an email complaint to the abuse@isp address and if the material is illegal in that jurisdiction or in breach of the Acceptable Use Policy of their Internet Service Provider and if they do take action to disconnect the person involved, they might be unable due to international data protection regulations to tell you the name of the offender. In many cases, the offender just moves to a different ISP and starts the process again.

Parents should also consider purchasing filtering software such as Net Nanny, Surf Control or similar which can block such emails on your machine and delete them before you see them.

Further information about filtering solutions are available on the www.hotline.ie website or on the website of the Internet Advisory Board. Alternatively, you could set up mail rules in your email program to automatically look for emails with certain words in them and delete them.

Further advice and information on safe websites for children is available from the National Centre for Technology in Education (NCTE) - an agency of the Department of Education and Science.