Fight Spam & Stop Taking It Lying Down!

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Fight Spam & Stop Taking It Lying Down! By Andres Munoz

Spam is the #1 annoyance on the net it seems these days and the fact is that not much is being done to stop it. The good news is that there are measures you can take to stop spammers with incredible results. Nothing drives me more insane than receiving spam in my business e-mail, it's one thing to receive it in your Yahoo or Hotmail account but having to waste your time to sift through the trash in your business e-mail is ridiculous.

I discovered one tool that has made a difference, www.samspade.org this website will allow you to perform a "Who Is" query of the offending website and locate who their Host Servers are! All you need to do is contact the hosting company and report the spammer. All right how do you find the spammers web address from the spam message?

IT'S SIMPLE!!
99% of the time they will use phony 'From' and 'To' addresses to hide their identity but they include their real web address within the message. Next go to www.samspade.org and paste the offender's web address in the first text box and press, "Do Stuff". You will then find out the spammers true identity. You will discover all types of information about the spammer but the single most important is their "Domain Servers". These are the servers that host their site and will look like:

NS.ABCHosting.Com
NS2.ABCHosting.Com

All you need to do is replace the "NS" with www. In this case the offender's host server is www.ABCHosting. All reputable hosting companies will have a very strict abuse policy and will list an e-mail address to report such abuses (ex. abuse@abchosting.com) You should however visit the website and locate the email address to report abuse, most likely it will be located on their "Terms of Service" page or their "Contact Us" page.

(Note: Some websites in particular porn sites use http://201.234.21.6 as an address. They are NOT immune paste that address in the text box and find out who they are and report them.)

I should also note that be careful when using this tool. Don't report spam especially if you signed up for their Newsletter or Sales Message, remember you "Opt-in" their mailing list.

Likewise be very careful when it comes to websites with affiliates, they may have affiliates that simply don't know how to market a product and will resort to spamming. These are easy to identify, the address may look like: http://www.abccompany.com/4556MS the 4556MS is most likely the affiliates ID. Simply contact the website and report the affiliates ID.

Some spammers are truly dumb and will not hide their IP address. If you receive spam try to view the message headers and sometimes it will reveal the "X-originating IP" this is the spammers IP address. Again paste the IP address in the text box and press "Do Stuff". You will find all you need to know to report them and they will lose their IP address.

On the flip side there are some spammers that are smart, they use a stealth bulk mailer that hides their IP address. Hopefully they will include a web address or an e-mail address. If it's the case that the spam message only contains an e-mail address to respond to like Yahoo, Hotmail or Excite then you can fight back by forwarding that e-mail to:
mailto:abuse@yahoo.com
mailto:abuse@hotmail.com
mailto:abuse@excite.com

You are now armed with a powerful tool to fight spam. Use it wisely and stop taking it lying down! Here are some additional tools for your arsenal.

http://www.samspade.org
http://www.arachnoid.com/lutusp/antispam.html http://www.mindworkshop.com/alchemy/nospam.html http://spamcop.net/

************************************************ Andres Munoz Andres publishes the "MyBiz E-zine" newsletter featuring articles about Promotion, Internet Marketing and Home Business advice and tips. The MyBiz reader will receive an article rich e-zine with few ads. To subscribe visit http://www.mybusiness-resource.com/ and download your free e-book. Discover how you can write killer ads in 5 simple steps that will hit your mark!