KILL SPAMMERS!
This page is presented as a public service by Reptilian Associates.
©1997 by Reptilian Associates. Reproduction of this document for non-commercial use is permitted as long as this notice is included and a pointer to this site is included. To reproduce this document for commercial use, whether for print or a for-profit Web site, request permission from alizard@ecis.com
Hot off the presses.
Somebody finally blew up a spammer. Before you go to the page, make sure
you're sitting down... if you find this as funny as I do, I don't want
you to fall to the floor and get hurt. NOW.
Good News: The most infamous spammer on the Net, a lawyer named
Laurence Canter (of Canter & Siegel) is no longer with us. The Supreme
Court of Tennessee has disbarred him due to illegal advertising practices.
For more information, go here.
The latest anti-spam trick I've seen is ... set the posting portion of your newsreader to post an address that isn't quite yours in your outgoing header and put the right address in your .signature file so that the automated scanners that read all Usenet posts in order to add your address to their junk-mail list will copy something useless to them and people can write to you.
You can find out about anti-spam software and how it works
from here or go
directly to the Spam Hater
program site. Spam Hater works for SLIP/PPP accounts. For those with shell
access, you can get a PERL script which filters the mail INBOX, this
should work for both SLIP mail and unix mail utilities. Get it here. Then check the rest of this
anti-spam site.
If you use the Eudora e-mail
program, (and if you're still using Netscape / MS Explorer e-mail as built
into your browser, you should consider changing) you can get an anti-spam
plug-in program at the Mailjail
site. Eudora also may now have PGP plug-in capabilities as well.
Did you know that spam may be prohibited by the anti-junk fax Federal
Law? This law might allow you to SUE the bastards that bug you in e-mail
in small claims court... for $500 per violation PLUS the judge has the
option of imposing punitive damages. Look carefully at the definition of
telephone facsimile machine used in the law... (any computer attached to a
printer and e-mail appears to qualify!) you can get a summary and full
text here.
For information on using traceroute from the
Web to monitor
point-to-point Web connections, check out the Boardwatch magazine traceroute pages.
To do this from a unix shell, simply type from the shell prompt:
traceroute sitename.xxx (domainname plus high-level domain, e.g.
illusions.com)
This is rather useful in tracing spammers, usually they have their
own domain name, meaning a complaint sent to postmaster@spamsite will
go straight to the scumball sending it to you. The last relay point
BEFORE the last relay with the name of the spam site will usually be
that of the Internet Service Provider the spammer is sending from. I mention
this because it isn't usually covered in the anti-spam articles I've
seen.
An excellent article on your options on handling spam (how to find
the spammer's ISP, etc.) from Microtimes Magazine can be found at this location. Some of
the more useful links are duplicated here. Another anti-spam site is Fight
Spam on the Internet!.
New (to me) anti-spam site - CAUCE.
If you've gotten yet another chain-letter / pyramid scheme, check out
this boilerplate reply.
And since I try to provide information for everyone, try these How To Spam instructions. I take no
responsibility for the results.
Usenet
Spam
Noticed how your favorite Usenet newsgroup is becoming increasingly
saturated with commercial crap, usually for garbage having nothing to do
with the newsgroup topic? One solution is kill files, but you have to read
the post first and worse, there's a lot of one-shot spam out there. To
complain to the site postmaster, get your news reader to display the FULL
header, in the Path: line, the last site (e.g. spammaker!notformail)
listed in the path, the one just before the end is the one where the post
came from. Send a copy of the offending post the postmaster@site with the
comment that the following is unwanted commercial spam. For more
information, go here.
If you've got a shell account as well as a SLIP/PPP account, here are
more tactics. They work well enough so I'm nailing a couple of spammers
a week:
Note the numerical addresses on the document. To find out who owns them,
telnet to your shell account and enter:
If you get a "does not exist", the IP is probably fake, try any other IP
addresses you find in the document from the bottom up. Once you come up
with the name of a real ISP, use whois if the suffix is
.com,.us,.gov.,mil,.edu)
whois (domainname)
Forward the spam to the e-mail addresses you find in the document with
the FULL HEADERS to enable tracing. If a fax number is listed, you can
also send a faxed complaint to the people who represent the site using
the information in this document.
If the address isn't in one of the above top level domains:
If the above doesn't work, go to this Web page with a listing of all the
TLD (top-level domains) domain registration sites in the world:
worldwide NIC list. Look
for the one that matches the last 2 or 3 letters in the name of the spam
originator. When you get there, feed the name of the spam site in.
If you don't have shell access, a page that supports whois and nslookup
(not by those names) is here. For traceroute,
see elsewhere on this (the one you're looking at) page.
Here's a creative way to annoy e-mail
spammers.
One of the most important anti-spam efforts is MAPS. (Mail Abuse Prevention System) They provide a list of known spam addresses to cooperating ISPs and software companies which use them for spam-block lists. Many people who think they have the right to spam regardless of what it does to waste system resources and people's time have threatened to sue them. People are finally making good on their threats. You can contribute to their Legal Defense Fund here and I recommend that you do. This is a good cause, it's a conflict between good guys and people you know to be scum.
Received: from ecis for alizard
with Cubic Circle's cucipop (v1.13 1996/12/26) Tue Mar 31 08:26:17 1998
X-From_: jennyswet@earthlink.net Tue Mar 31 06:27:10 1998
Received: from earthlink.net (pm085-12.dialip.mich.net [141.217.128.202]) by ecis.ecis.com (8.8.5/8.7.2) with SMTP id GAA14166 for <alizard@ecis.com>; Tue, 31 Mar 1998 06:27:08 -0800
Date: Tue, 31 Mar 1998 06:27:08 -0800
From: jennyswet@earthlink.net
Message-Id: <199803311427.GAA14166@ecis.ecis.com>
To: <amms@ammsvces.com>
Subject: We've Got The Girls To Grab Your Attention
nslookup 141.217.128.202
If it's in europe, try
fwhois spammer.xxx@whois.ripe.net
Asia:
try
fwhois spammer.xxx@whois.apnic.net
Send mail to me at alizard@ecis.com