[Air-l] Re: spam

[Eszter Hargittai]

Hi,

The following two links went out on my list yesterday that I thought may
be of interest to people curious about spam:

Spam feeding anger on Internet (w/some tips on how to handle email)
http://www.chicagotribune.com/technology/chi-0201070115jan07.story?coll=chi%2Dbusiness%2Dhed

Essays on junk email
http://www.templetons.com/brad/spume/

Yes, I think Michel Menou is right, responding to spam can only worsen the
situation because you confirm that yours is an active account.  (This is
relevant because spammers often just generate email addresses hoping they
work (suzyq at hotmail.com, suzyq at yahoo.com) and if you respond they'll know
it worked.)

I'll try restating Valdis' suggestion for tracking down spam, although I
do believe it would take a full time job to respond to all messages.

Here's an example from a spam message header:

>Received: from dougfir([128.32.179.166]) by btamail.net.cn(JetMail
>2.5.3.0)
>           with SMTP id jm213c392c2e; Mon,  7 Jan 2002 05:00:37 -0000
>X-Mailer: FoxMail 3.5 Release [cn]

It looks like the message is from China (.cn), but if you put
128.32.179.166 into a reverse IP lookup engine, you'll soon find out that
the message travelled via a server at Berkeley.  I figured that
was worth pursuing. So I sent a note to abuse at berkeley.edu with that
part of the header. (As extra precaution, I don't send the whole header
that includes my email address that was spammed and I send the abuse note
from my Yahoo account.)  Within a day I had gotten two follow-ups. It
turned out that the machine had a worm which led to the problems and they 
fixed it.

Of course, the spammers will find other avenues to your mailbox, but it
seems that this could be a small step to clean things up, and if more
people followed up on it... but then again, who has time...

Eszter

---
Eszter's List: http://www.eszter.com/elist