Parker: Spam - a different approach

[Parker]

Food for thought from Kiro5hin.org:

Responding to Spammers -- The Internet Strikes Back (Culture)

By darkonc
Wed Nov 5th, 2003 at 09:41:24 AM EST

One of the things that I live my life according to is the question: "What would happen if everybody did this?". This is one of the reasons why I would never spam.. If everybody did that, we would end up with, well, the situation we've got with spam.

Today, I got so fed up with the spam I've been receiving (I'm up to about 300 spams a day now), that I picked two random spams, went to their web sites and typed in random data into their forms. One of those sites was even kind enough to respond with a toll free number that I could use if I was overly eager to talk to them ( 1-866-561-9216 -- inaccessible from Canada). Then I asked myself my recurring question "What if everybody did this?".

I liked the answer.

We've been going about it all wrong. We need to start responding to spam.

Link to full story below

The Internet Strikes Back

[sickofspam]

what to do about spam:
display full headers
find the isp address that sent the spam to you, all other stuff is probably forged so ignore it
enter the isp address into:
http://www.geektools.com/whois.php
find the abuse address, something like [email protected]
forward the spam with full headers there, copy it also to [email protected]
if you think you might have a virus:
http://housecall.antivirus.com/housecall/start_corp.asp
if you think you might have a trojan or malware:
http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/
http://www.spywareinfo.com/
microsoft info:
http://www.microsoft.com/security/
http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/java/

[sickofspam]

an example of how to find what isp sent you a piece of spam:
here's the key part of the header of some spam i got on my yahoo account:

Received: from 24.174.22.74 (HELO cs2417422-74.houston.rr.com) (24.174.22.74) by mta131.mail.sc5.yahoo.com with SMTP; Tue, 18 Nov 2003 12:02:01 -0800

you can see that yahoo received this spam from (24.174.22.74), plugging that address into geektools shows that the source is in fact rr.com (it's not always the same because the other stuff can be forged) and the spam address is [email protected], so that is where i forward this one (copy to [email protected]) make sure to include full headers so they can figure out where it came from (each email program has a different way to display full headers)

look for the numerical address that sent you the email, that cannot be forged

most if not all isp's prohibit spam (the ones that don't are generally blacklisted)

[Norm Wattenberger]

Unfortunately, I think the IP can be forged. And although most ISPs claim to not allow SPAM - this is a phony 'official' policy merely to keep them from being blacklisted. Yahoo, for example, is a huge source of SPAM and regularly ignores complaints. Worse, a large percent of ISPs even allow software piracy sites. One well known Arizona ISP providing pirated copies of my software not only ignored my complaints, but barred my IP so I couldn't even file additional complaints after I filed a digital copyright violation report to them. Face it, most ISPs are crooks.