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Dealing with Spam

May 10, 2004

Spam seems to be a has-been topic of discussion on the internet these days and yet, we still deal with it on a day to day basis. Over the past few weeks my spam has increased signifigantly and because of that I've added some extra anti-spam measures that I should have used when I first put this site up.
First, any mentions of my email address in HTML on this site have been fortified by using non-standard naming. You'll see authgeek/at\authenticgeek|dot|net or something similar to deter spambots just snatching them right off the page. When you see something like that as a link, the link should contain a valid email address. It's been converted to a string of HTML entities to deter lifting the address from the page source as well. Conversion is an easy task - go to safeemail.org and input your email. The site will return a string that looks like this: authgeek@authe nticgeek.net - this is you email address. Just use this in the email links that you use (href="mailto:yourconvertedaddresshere") and you're that much more protected.
Second, reporting spam is easier than you think. Instead of just deleting your spam, spend a minute to report it to the proper authority. The hardest part of this process is finding the extended header information in your email client. Headers are strings of information that tell your mail where to go, and luckily for us, where it was sent from. In OS X's Mail.app, you can reveal extra header information by choosing View > Show All Headers when you have an email open. Other applications may have the same option as menu items or preferences. Use this option in your mail client and then copy all the new header information that shows up in your email. It should look something like this:

From: "Tracey Bauer" <889puds@yahoo.com>
Date: Fri Jan 25, 2002 1:07:26 AM US/Eastern
To:
Subject: you need this nmre wdvv
Reply-To: "Tracey Bauer" <889puds@yahoo.com>
Return-Path: <889puds@yahoo.com>
Received: from 205-10.202-68.tampabay.rr.com[68.202.10.205]
(helo=205-10.202-68.tampabay.rr.com) by mx.perfora.net with ESMTP
(Nemesis), id 1BNDsD-0UHN-0MKv22-0000sM; Mon, 10 May 2004 12:43:25 -0400
Received: from [85.203.81.83] by 205-10.202-68.tampabay.rr.com with
ESMTP id 09999057 for ; Fri, 25 Jan 2002
06:07:26 -0100
Message-Id: <7$$9s$y$tu0c@1rjkuli>
X-Mailer: AOL 7.0 for Windows US sub 118
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="881E09..5_.7FEC6_"
X-Priority: 3
X-Msmail-Priority: Normal
X-Spamscore: 10.281 tests= DATE_SPAMWARE_Y2K FORGED_YAHOO_RCVD
FROM_NUM_AT_WEBMAIL FORGED_MUA_AOL_FROM
Then use your mail client to forward the email and at the top of the email body, insert the header information that you copied from the original email. We decide where to send it with a little reasoning based on the headers. Take a look at the first 'Received:' section of the headers above. We can see that the email hasn't ACTUALLY been sent from yahoo.com as the email suggests. It's been sent from a Road Runner cable subscriber. Most big companies (like road runner, comcast, yahoo, hotmail, etc) have abuse mailboxes set up just for this purpose. Now that we have the original email contents with the headers that we copied over, we're going to forward this email to 'abuse@rr.com' (if this was from somethingsomeone.yourisp.com, we'd forward to abuse@yourisp.com). Road Runner sends you back a confirmation email letting you know that they got the email and other companies may or may not send you back a confirmation. You have sucessfully reported a spammer. With new anti-spam legislation running about, this is a great time to cut deep in to the amount of spam you get.

Nick O'Neill

 

 

 

 

 

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