At 16:46 -0800 3/15/02, ahimsa opined: >someone (sorry, lost the attribution) suggested: >> Report spammers to their upstream providers. > >Is using SpamCop good enough?
SpamCop reports to the ISP that owns the IP address from which the mail originates (and/or to which the recipient is directed by an email address or website URL). It is actually quite good about figuring this out. In the case of the spammer equivalent of script kiddies -- who buy commercial spamware to distribute their spew but don't otherwise know what they're doing -- this is generally good enough. Recidivist criminal spammers, however, often get their IP addresses delegated to them. In that case, SpamCop ends up reporting the abuse to the spammer him/herself. I doubt this is particularly effective. I do wish that SpamCop had the *option* of reporting abuse to one or more upstream providers. I suspect I know why they don't, though. Knowing when to do so can be tricky, and the larger backbone providers would soon get overwhelmed by (and probably blacklist) SpamCop reports that could and should be handled farther down the food chain. >I also have another question. On many pieces of spam I notice that >there is a string that looks like it may be an identifier of some >kind. Most spamware puts random letters at the end of the subject line to prevent people from creating simple filters to trash the spam. In addition, a great deal of tracking goes on. Most mail clients, for example, will load the images in an HTML message only when it is actually viewed. The URLs pointing to the images can contain an encoded form of the recipient's email address, thereby alerting the spammer that s/he has an email address of someone who actually opens and looks at spam. For that reason, you should *always* set your email client to not display images in HTML email. If your client doesn't offer this option, trash your client and get another one. Similarly, spamware often puts identifiers in the message body so that the spammers can track people who reply (possibly to the "remove" address) or complain. --Ron -- Ron Risley [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.risley.net _______________________________________________ spamcon-general mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.spamcon.org/mailman/listinfo/spamcon-general#subscribers Subscribe, unsubscribe, etc: Use the URL above or send "help" in body of message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Contact administrator: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
