Where to begin? I guess a little background and education is in order. I've had a presence on the web for about 7 years or so. I learned early on that to keep unwanted email away, you have more then one email address. I have several ... one for my web site, one for software registration purposes, one from my Internet Service Provider, and one that I use to correspond to friends and family. Recently one of my unpublished email accounts started to recieve spam from a company listed below. I'm pretty sure I know how they got my address. You see, a friend (they now have to use one of my hotmail accounts) signed up on a site that would give away free movie tickets ... same type of deal as sending out e cards. And, if you really like your friends, send them a nice personal email ... stay away from the e card sites. Once you give them an email address, you might as well get ready for spam of some sort.
Back to my spam issue. There are tools for us to fight spam. I'm sure mine is not new, but I thought I should share this with the masses. And, boy, I'm going to irritate some people now. If you have a web site on the Internet, all of your information is public. The web site I start gathering the needed information is whois.com. This will give you a wealth of information ... more information than I care to have out there on the Internet. An example follows (and this just happens to be my spammer) ...
Registrar Name....: Register.com
Registrar Whois...: whois.register.com
Registrar Homepage: http://www.register.com
Domain Name: armchairmill.net
Created on..............: 17 Nov 2004 22:28:24
Expires on..............: 17 Nov 2005 22:28:24
Registrant Info:
bonusbonez.com
Network Operations
PO Box 2848 - From another listing the real address is 268 Bush Street #3437, 94104
San Francisco, CA 94111
US
Phone: +1.4157380516
Fax..:
Email: info@bonusbonez.com
See, lots of information ... and this is only part of the filling. So, the company that is spamming me is armchairmill.net, a bounusbonez.com web site. Think of bounusbonez as the parent company of a bunch of small spammer sites. They all use the same email address list. By the way, they aren't very smart ... just very irritating. You also can note that the Registrar, the company that rented/sold the domain name, is register.com. This is very usefull information. Register.com rents/sells discounted domain names. I would love to be able to pay their discounted rates, but I just don't trust them! You see, on their web site they have links to articles about maximizing your email lists. All above board, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
So, if you can find a spammers web site host, you could send the host an email, with the offending headers attached and try to get the site removed from the host servers. But that doesn't help in my case, because bounusbonez.com owns their own servers. So onto plan B ... start sending the offending spam to the registrar, in this case register.com, in hopes of getting their web site revoked. I haven't given up hope that they will actually blackball this group of people, but it's not looking very good ... the spam keeps rolling in. As I said before, the spammers in my situation are not very smart, they have a wide digital trail one can follow. Even though plan B is not exhausted, this is plan C ... letting you in on some of the Internet's tools.
A great source of information regarding Internet security, spam falls under that large umbrella, is at the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Teams (cert) site. You can see specific documents on email issues at http://cert.gov/cas/alldocs.html#tips (cut and paste the url into your browser window). With information you can reduce the amount of spam and spammers out in cyber land. Maybe, they would actually have to get a real job like the rest of us!