Anti Spam Methods
Ideas to reduce spam and how to complain.
The spam virus
The volume of spam I receive is ballooning these days such that even deleting it is taking up too much of my time. So now I am actively working to reduce the spam. Here are some ideas I have on spam reduction techniques:
Viruses can be useful!
Warning: Please ensure you have up to date anti-virus software running on your computer!
Many viruses use the email addresses stored on a computer to propagate the virus. So if you receive a virus attachment by email, you are in the senders address book. The sender most likely didn't want to send you a virus but if you never heard of them, what are they doing keeping your email address?
How to find out the sender of spam email.
On receipt of a spam email, view the message source and look for the original senders IP address. Usually you can right click on the email and view it's properties and then view the message source. Make sure you don't open any attachment since this may activate a virus.
Note that the sender name and reply email address are likely to be bogus. The true sender is revealed by the IP address. Usually the email has travelled via several IP address nodes before it reaches you so you need the source IP address which is tagged by the oldest date and time stamp.
Example IP address: 172.138.184.69
How to decode an IP address
This is called reverse IP lookup and will reveal the contact details of the administrative contact responsible for the server that forwarded the email.
Click here for a simple IP Address Trace
AMNESI.COM provide a free online reverse IP lookup service.
How to complain about spam
Once you have the contact email you can send a copy of the message header to the administator for their investigation. This is the text revelead in the message source that preceeds the visible content of the email.
An example of what I might send:
I have received the file coor.scr
which was infected with the W32.Klez.H@mm virus.
The sender is not known to me.
Here is the message header:
Thus I have informed them not only about a virus but also hinted that they are a potential spammer to their web host.
Be warned that some companies have been set up to host spammers so they won't respond to your complaints and will be happy to know that their spam reached a real person who read and responded to their email!
If the second IP node is a university or large company, their services are being abused so it's probably better to alert them which may be more effective than complaining to the originator.
