> What specific advice can you offer frustrated list owners who receive a
> lot of spam and don't have your technical knowledge to trace them
> properly? I am among those people who use traceroute to the first IP
> address appearing in the forged headers, hoping against hope that it will
> reveal the name of its ISP.
Don't do that. Use a super-whois like the ones at geektools.com or
samspade.org to see who's responsible for that address. As already
abundantly noted, traceroutes run through a lot of networks only
tangentially related to the endpoints.
Once you've figured out what domain is responsible, feel free to use
my abuse.net service to route your message to the responsible person
for that domain. See www.abuse.net.
> "Federal Trade Commission: Spam Reports" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Yes, they collect spam for statistical purposes.
> Spam Complaints - WA Attorney General's Office <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Since you're in Washington, that's probably OK, too.
> Is there a public resource where I, and less-technical spam-victims like
> me, can learn how to trace spam more effectively and accurately?
Some resources to help figure out where a particular spam came from
include:
http://spam.abuse.net/others/sites.html
http://www.ybecker.net/resources/header_reading.html
There's also the somewhat controversial Spamcop at www.spamcop.net,
which attempts to diagnose spam sources automatically. It's better
than it used to be, probably guesses right two times out of three.
It's worth using to get some hints about the source of a mystery spam,
although I wouldn't use it's auto-complaining feature.
Regards,
John Levine, [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
(and postmaster of about 100 other domains)
