Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

["David R. Matusiak" <matusiak AT speakeasy.net>]

Neal --

as you may or may not be aware, the worldwide DNS system can already provide 
you 
/some/ of this information. "whois" is a command-line tool for tracing back 
to 
domain admin information. for those not interested in CLI tools, you can use 
<http://www.betterwhois.com/>. i'm sure there are other ways to get this info 
as 
well (for example, Mac OSX has some built in GUI tools for this).

the problem is not getting the contact info, but getting anything DONE 
related 
to the abuse. often there is fake info given to registrars, so your 
complaints 
effectively go nowhere. even when there is factual contact info, they never 
seem 
to answer (or return) phone calls and abuse emails go unanswered.

the next step from here is to contact their ISP, host, provider, etc. as you 
can 
see, this begins eating all of the spare time you used to have. so, we tend 
to 
rely on imperfect systems like MAPS (and now-defunct ORBS) to "filter the 
internet" for us. MAPS seems to have A LOT more enemies than i would have 
ever 
expected. abuse from all sides, as far as i can see...

so, until the crude, uneducated opportunists of the internet choose to 
regulate 
themselves (HA!) we will have these problems. or until the homeland security 
office steps in and mentions that the spam issue has reached the level of RED 
(or CRITICAL) and decides to bomb spammers offices "back to afghanistan."

___  _ _____ . ....
m a h t o o z e e a c k  a t  s p e e k e e z e e  d o t  n e t
------ / / .........     . . .

On Thu, 28 Mar 2002, Neal wrote:

> One of the things that's always urked me about spam is that I can almost 
> always tell when the
> return e-mail address is bogus without even trying to reply to it.
> 
> I like this idea from ( http://mail-abuse.org/gc_rbl.html ):
> 
> "" ** Greeting Card sites could place a card into a pending spool and email 
> a notification back to
> the sender, requiring either a web link or email response, prior to 
> activating the card and
> sending mail to the final recipient. This will verify that the listed 
> sender address is valid and
> responding to email. "" 
> 
> Also... keep in mind that the sender is trying to get a message across.. be 
> it advertising a web
> site, selling a product, etc... and hence they eventually do have to 
> provide you with some sort of
> "real" contact information.. be it a URL to the site, a phone number, etc...
> 
> .. and that's where I would love to see a client-side tool come in..  for 
> instance:  A tool that
> would allow you to select the e-mail and pull URLs from it... lookup the 
> owners domain / contact
> information for that domain.. and send them a nasty-gram back.. etc..
> 
> - Neal