How to Report Spam
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As I have a full head of hair, the email I received regarding hair restoration was definitely something I hadnât requested. As far as I was concerned this was definitely a spam to me. There are many steps in reporting spam, and they usually require a bit of detective work to figure out who is the spammer. I will use the above example to walk you through the various steps in determining the spammer and who to report it to. A few of the entries have been changed so as not to reveal the spammer, but you will understand the process.
Step 1 ö Is it really Spam?
Before you jump on the seek-and-destroy mission, make sure you havenât requested this email from some network associate of the sender. If you donât understand the definition of spam, read the article " What is Spam? "
Step 2 ö Identify the spammer or where the spam originated from?
This gets a little complicated and technical, but with some work you can generally find the spammer or the ISP where the emails originated from. Usually, the spammer wonât identify themselves with a return address. To determine the spammer, use your email program to reveal the full details of the header in the email. In Outlook Express, you can right-click on the email, select Properties, then select the Details tab. Portions of the email header from the hair restoration example are below.
Return-Path: hairinstitute@mx9.wackythumbtacky.com Delivered-To: jerryr@myaccount.net Received: from mx9.wackythumbtacky.com (65.214.161.166) To: jerryr@myaccount.net From: "Hair Institute" hairinstitute@mx9.wackythumbtacky.com Reply-To: remove@wackythumbtacky.com Return-Path: hairinstitute@mx9.wackythumbtacky.com Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 16:15:41 -0700 Subject: Spam Alert: Natural Hair can be yours X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.01.3876.6061 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: multipart/alternative; boundary="XXXX-Simple-Boundry-XXXX"
In some cases, you can look at some of the identifiers in the email header, such as hairinstitute and wackythumbtacky.com. By appending a www, .com, or .net to the header identifiers, you can see if they have a website and to file a complaint at the website. This rarely works. In many cases they will use misleading names. In the above email header, www.wackythumbtacky.com was a valid website, but gave absolutely no information. Even though the hair restoration company was listed in the email advertisement and they also had a website, it was obvious there was no personal information as far as complaining directly to the company. A Whois lookup at www.internic.com (identifies who owns the website) didn't tell me much more about the websites. The contact information was missing
The next step was to track down who actually sent the email or the upstream provider who passed along the email. To do this, you need to perform a tracert (Trace Route) function. This allows you to trace all of the routes from the spammers server to your server. If tracert is available on your computer, you would enter the following command: tracert www.wackythumbtacky.com . If you donât have access to tracert there are many trace route gateways available on the Internet through a search engine. The following is the actual trace route results:
Tracing route to wackythumbtacky.com [65.214.161.157]: 1 61 ms 47 ms 47 ms 192.168.1.1 2 51 ms 48 ms 47 ms slkc6400gw3poolG254.slkc.uswest.net 63.228.207.254] 3 50 ms 49 ms 49 ms slkc-dsl-gw29.slkc.uswest.net [209.181.81.29] 4 49 ms 49 ms 51 ms slc-core-01.tamerica.net [205.171.131.21] 5 66 ms 61 ms 59 ms den-core-02.tamerica.net [205.171.8.105] 6 91 ms 83 ms 83 ms 208.214.100.9 7 83 ms 83 ms 85 ms 153.at-5-0-0.CL2.DEN4.ALTER.NET [152.63.92.154] 8 83 ms 83 ms 83 ms 0.so-2-0-0.TL2.SLT4.ALTER.NET [152.63.102.14] 9 95 ms 95 ms 95 ms 0.so-3-0-0.TL2.LAX2.ALTER.NET [152.63.29.109] 10 95 ms 95 ms 95 ms 0.so-5-0-0.CL2.LAX15.ALTER.NET [152.63.115.201] 11 98 ms 97 ms 97 ms POS5-0.GW1.LAX15.ALTER.NET [152.63.115.213] 12 94 ms 95 ms 95 ms your1host-GW.customer.alter.net [208.222.14.182] 13 103 ms 101 ms 103 ms available.your1host.net [65.214.161.157]
Trace complete.
Many times, you will find timeout errors and you may not get back to the original sender. In the hair restoration example above, if you look at the last entry, it is most likely that www.your1host.net is the ISP provider of the spammer.
Step 3 ö File the Complaint
Determining who to file the complaint with is not as easy as it sounds. You can file the complaint with the company who was paying for the advertisement (if you know who this is), but this usually falls on deaf hears. They had already made the decision to spam or to hire a spamming company in the first place. Next you should complain to the spammers local ISP, which in the above example is www.your1host.net. Remember to be polite with them, they didnât do the spamming, they just provided Internet access to the spammer. To file the complaint see if the local ISP has a web page specifically devoted to complaints. If not, you can always attempt emails to the Webmaster at the ISP. Be sure to include a copy of the email header. With enough complaints, it is possible that the local ISP can actually terminate the spammers access to the Internet. Without access to the Internet, spammers canât do their little tricks. As you can see, this can be very time-consuming and challenging to track down the spammer, and it doesnât always work because of some of the tricks that spammers play.
Step 4 - Move Upstream, if Necessary
If you get no response from the local ISP, you can always move upstream to a larger ISP Provider, usually this is a major carrier. In the hair restoration example, the upstream provider was www.alter.net , which happens to be redirected to MCI at www.mci.com .
Once you have filed a complaint with the local ISP or the upstream provider, you must realize that you may never see the fruits of your labors. You probably wonât get a response from the ISP because of the volume of complaints they receive. Some may receive thousands of complaints per day. Most responsible ISPâs do investigate some complaints, especially if there is a large volume related to one particular customer of the ISP.
You can also complain to a forwarding service such as www.abuse.net ., www.spamcop.net . You can file a complaint to the US Federal Trade Commission at uce@ftc.gov for products that donât work, scams, or pyramid schemes. You can also file a complaint to the US Securities and Exchange Commission at enforcement@sec.gov for spam involving stock schemes.
Spamming has become a huge problem and will only get worse. Please do your part in educating people and businesses about the costs associated with spam. With enough people battling the problem of spam, results will surface. Please refer your friends and associates to this website to help with the awareness of the problems associated with spam.
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