Attention visitors to PoolRoom.com
You may have been the victim of a Spammer. Recently we received a number of bounced messages indicating that a spammer has been forging our domain on email addresses in the "From:" field of outgoing spam emails.

Why would a spammer forge header data?
Spammers forge email header data like the From: and Reply-To: lines because they do not want to receive complaints (or complaints to their ISP). They just want your money. Unfortunately email forgery is simple and commonplace. 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 a company/website Administrator, you can't prevent spammers from forging your email address/domain in the spam that they send. You can't conceal your email addresses and only reveal them to trustworthy individuals. Your clients, visitors, and friends need to be able to contact you.

How can you be sure we weren't responsible for the spam?
Every email sent over the internet contains information called header data. Some of that header data can be forged, some of it cannot. Spammers typically forge a large percentage of their header data. If you receive/have received an email (allegedly from us), we encourage you to examine the full headers. Most email clients (Software) have a 'show full headers' feature/capability. Examine the IP addresses in the header, you will likely find that much of the data is forged, and you will also find that the header data does not point back to us, our ISP, our web host, or our email server(s). If you are unsure how to read/interpret the header data, we encourage you to do a little research. You can start by reading a brief tutorial on header data.

So what should you do with this spam?

If you receive spam...

1. The simplest 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. You don't really think your credit information is safe with somebody who forges emails for a living, do you?