1) Forging from headers is criminal in a number of ways: a) A number of States have laws on the books: Ref: http://www.cauce.org http://www.suespammers.org These laws criminalize forging of headers. No gray area.
b) The bounces cause resource theft of AOL's servers, and bandwidth.
c) Civil action for misuse of trademark and goodwill.
2) There is an automated way of sending complaints: Register with abuse.net (Run by John Levine). Then you send your complaint to the domain you want to complain to, @abuse.net, and John's system automagically forwards it to the right address for that domain.
3) If you want to hunt the spammers down yourself, try Steve Atkins' Sam Spade (http://www.samspade.org)
4) Hitting delete is NOT an option. It does not scale.
5) There is no Federal Bill. Those disclaimers you see are bogus. They often refer to HR 1716, or Murkowski. These were proposed, but *never* passed. There is no Inbox or Federal Bill that protects spam. There is a Federal Bill making its way through the house currently, HR 3113. It is a "good"(tm) thing. Support it.
6) When all else fails.. If you can't get the spammer's IPS's attention, *don't do anything illegal*. Visit http://mail-abuse.org, document your efforts, and nominate the spammer, and his ISP to the RBL. Trust me, it is *extremely* effective in educating the ISP.
a) a whois proxy which proxies all known tlds, including gTLDs, ccTLDs. It is available as a command line proxy at whois.geektools.com. If you send a blank request, it will display a basic help screen.
c) Under the software link, a generic *nix source tarball if you want to run your own local proxy.GeekTools Software.
d) Also under software, a windows binary that runs out of your system tray.
They all operate in a similar way, except that the ui version will allow you to hotlink to elements of the answer (contact, nameservers, etc).
Importantly, they know about.com.net. org. edu..mil.gov and about 95 Country Codes automagically. It also knows about ip addresses, handles, arin records, radb policies, AS numbers, obfuscated ip addresses (spammers hack) etc.
We try and keep on top of the new whois changes around the world. If anyone can fill holes for us in the list, please email us!
We limit the number of queries per day to 50 from any ip address to thwart spammers. If you have a good legitimate reason for more queries a day, and give us your real contact information, we'll lift the restriction. Just email the address on the site.
This was indeed me. And I did not post it anonymously (as you see I do have a/. userid. Somehow previewing my post screwed the source, and Anonymous Coward took over. Rodney Joffe (rlj@safeeps.com) etc.
Actually, this is not accurate. Third class mail has subsidized first and second class mail for most of the last 15 years (see the USPS budget). Additionally, the reason that third class mail appears to be declining (it isn't really, - it is climbing at a slower rate than first class mail)is because the USPS requires users to do a significant portion of the task themselves, by way of address accuracy correction, presorting, and National Change of Address application.
Slashdot Mirror
An omnibus reply to many of the posts:
1) Forging from headers is criminal in a number of ways:
a) A number of States have laws on the books:
Ref: http://www.cauce.org
http://www.suespammers.org
These laws criminalize forging of headers. No gray area.
b) The bounces cause resource theft of AOL's servers, and bandwidth.
c) Civil action for misuse of trademark and goodwill.
2) There is an automated way of sending complaints:
Register with abuse.net (Run by John Levine). Then you send your complaint to the domain you want to complain to, @abuse.net, and John's system automagically forwards it to the right address for that domain.
3) If you want to hunt the spammers down yourself, try Steve Atkins' Sam Spade (http://www.samspade.org)
4) Hitting delete is NOT an option. It does not scale.
5) There is no Federal Bill. Those disclaimers you see are bogus. They often refer to HR 1716, or Murkowski. These were proposed, but *never* passed. There is no Inbox or Federal Bill that protects spam. There is a Federal Bill making its way through the house currently, HR 3113. It is a "good"(tm) thing. Support it.
6) When all else fails..
If you can't get the spammer's IPS's attention, *don't do anything illegal*. Visit http://mail-abuse.org, document your efforts, and nominate the spammer, and his ISP to the RBL. Trust me, it is *extremely* effective in educating the ISP.
Specifically:
.com .net. org. edu. .mil .gov and about 95 Country Codes automagically. It also knows about ip addresses, handles, arin records, radb policies, AS numbers, obfuscated ip addresses (spammers hack) etc.
Geektools (a "public domain" project from CenterGate Research Group ) has:
a) a whois proxy which proxies all known tlds, including gTLDs, ccTLDs. It is available as a command line proxy at whois.geektools.com. If you send a blank request, it will display a basic help screen.
b) A web UI at GeekTools WHOIS
c) Under the software link, a generic *nix source tarball if you want to run your own local proxy. GeekTools Software .
d) Also under software, a windows binary that runs out of your system tray.
They all operate in a similar way, except that the ui version will allow you to hotlink to elements of the answer (contact, nameservers, etc).
Importantly, they know about
We try and keep on top of the new whois changes around the world. If anyone can fill holes for us in the list, please email us!
We limit the number of queries per day to 50 from any ip address to thwart spammers. If you have a good legitimate reason for more queries a day, and give us your real contact information, we'll lift the restriction. Just email the address on the site.
This was indeed me. And I did not post it anonymously (as you see I do have a /. userid. Somehow previewing my post screwed the source, and Anonymous Coward took over.
Rodney Joffe (rlj@safeeps.com) etc.
Actually, this is not accurate. Third class mail has subsidized first and second class mail for most of the last 15 years (see the USPS budget). Additionally, the reason that third class mail appears to be declining (it isn't really, - it is climbing at a slower rate than first class mail)is because the USPS requires users to do a significant portion of the task themselves, by way of address accuracy correction, presorting, and National Change of Address application.