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Tracking Spam to the Source
cygnusx writes: "MSNBC is carrying a Wall Street Journal article on one reporter's attempts to track the spam she receives to the source. Armed with a few Hotmail and Yahoo accounts, reporter Stacy Forster actually responded to most of the barrage of spam she began to receive after a week or so. Not quite the best investigative jounalism ever seen, but still a good glimpse (or so I thought) at those who send us those unloved missives about "exciting business opportunities" and "millions of $$$ waiting"."
I bet that works great when the source address is spoofed.
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One spammer interviewed in the article says he sends out about 15,000 spam messages a day and gets 10-15 new customers out of that. So I guess the message about spam we send to these people is that's it's worth it.
It feels like we're kinda stuck - it's annoying and stupid, but spam is here to stay. That 1/1000 is a good enough target for these businesses, and e-mail addresses are so cheap to get they might as well go for it. The only thing I can think of is being extra careful to NEVER look into an e-mail that even looks like spam - don't go to the website, don't buy the product, even if it could be interesting.
I once asked a telemarketer if he hated his life, he said he did. I thought it was kinda funny that he admitted it straight out - it was proof that the underbelly world of cheap advertising is evil.
spacefem.com
Did you contact an attorney about suing for wrongful termination? Can you provide a link to your post?
Another proud carrier of the $rtbl flag
The least you can do is cost the spammer their account. Depending on the spams contents I...
Traceroute the last reliable IP of the sending email address. Know your mail gateways and take the IP address it received the mail from, traceroute it and report to abuse@[someisp].[ext]. If seems unreputable, cc their isp.
Visit the web page. Do it. This is to find out if there's a redirect in place. http://[somefreewebhost].com/[directory] redirects to http://[scumballspammer].com/ . Traceroute and report the site it redirected you to to the appropriate ISP. Least it will do is annoy the sysadmin, and we know how sysadmins can be. Best case is they lose their site, any money put toward it, and pay a penalty fee.
If the web page sends you somewhere to order, visit it, traceroute it, and report. (Same reasons as above.)
In the case of javascript encoded html, it's easy to rewrite. Look for the document.write( xxx ); statement and change it to document.write( "<form><textarea>" + xxx + "</textarea>" ); . Repeat as necessary. Follow steps above.