From Artist To Spam-Hunter

I am Kobayashi writes "Wired has a story about Andy Markley, a graphic artists, whose business domain name was spoofed by infamous spammer Eddy Marin and used to spam thousands of people. After the incident recurred at a new ISP, and at the risk of his business and sanity, Markley fought back. He tracked down Marin through several spoofed email addresses and several hi-jacked servers, and eventually was successful in getting Marin's current ISP to shut down his account. Too bad he was a graphic artist and not a professional bounty hunter...."

Comments

glad for one positive hit

[SHEENmaster]

Get 10,000,000 more of these guys and major domains will start accepting mail from innocent bystandards like me that are unlucky enough to be on small subnets again.

Not surprising that his previous ISP did nothing..

[Dimensio]

Verio is notoriously spam- and crime-friendly. So much so that I wouldn't be surprised if their management sold their children out to child pornography websites.

As for convicted coke dealer Eddy Marin, he deserves horrible and painful death for his actions. It's sad that no one has taken him out yet.

Legal question

[Michael Woodhams]

A scenario: Someone damages you, but it is hard to figure out who it was. You spend money and/or time and track them down. You succeed, and sue them.

Can you include the cost of tracking them down in the damages you are suing for?

Can you sue for more than your actual costs, to account for the risk you took that you'd be unsuccessful in tracking them down (hence your time/money would be gone with no possibility of being repaid)?

Re:SpamCop will help with backtracking headers

[Phroggy]

What has your experience with SpamCop's system been?

Nothing but good things to say about them, and I've been on the other end too - I've worked in the abuse department at an ISP, and the vast majority of our spam complaints came from SpamCop. They put all the most important info in the subject line and the reports are all formatted consistently, making it very easy to deal with them. We were understaffed for awhile, so the SpamCop reports were the ones I dealt with first, because I could get them out of the way faster.

I also use the service myself. There have been some occasional glitches, which have almost entirely been due to denial of service attacks. These glitches have not caused me to lose mail, but DDoS attacks have caused mail to be delayed on occasion - normally it's delivered in seconds, but I've seen it take a day or so.

The way I have it set up, mail to my domain is forwarded to my SpamCop account, and anything that doesn't get stopped by their filter is forwarded on to my server at home. If I have any problems with my server at home, I can disable the forwarding and use SpamCop's webmail temporarily.

Depending on how you have things set up, if SpamCop thinks something doesn't look right, it is possible to report yourself to your own ISP's abuse department. They don't like that much. When submitting a complaint, be sure to review the list of addresses the complaint will be sent to before sending it.