Re: Spam

["Uhh...this is Joe [Randall Farmer]" <rfarmer@HiWAAY.net>]

> I've got a question for y'all.
> 
> Some idiot finally sent me a junk e-mail message that I couldn't do anything
> about with what I have the knowledge to do -- reading the headers turned up
> only one ISP, which was apparently owned by the spammer. 

Well, if it's used only for spam, get it on some block lists.

> 
> I'm hoping you guys would know where I could find out more about this
> individual -- I'm hoping that he does in fact buy his service from someone
> else, and if so, I'm not sure how to find that out. 

Well, it's pretty easy to harass or otherwise push someone off of the Net (I
guess that's why we've got Eternity servers and anonymous remailers)...do a
traceroute and an Internic whois. This will reveal his/her/its/their upstream
provider (a hop or two before the end of the traceroute or as a contact on the
whois results), among other things.

> If he doesn't, is there anything I can do?

Well, although I don't think this would be warranted for anything short of an
emergency, you could try a more direct DoS attack by hacking, death threats, or
DoS Politics, or you could try to get more powerful entities than yourself
pissed off at the spammer. Like I said, though, I don't think it's wise to
start a Scientology-esque netwar whenever an ISP turns you a deaf ear. Can't
imagine being a remailer operator trying to defend against all this, though...

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Randall Farmer
    rfarmer@hiwaay.net
    http://hiwaay.net/~rfarmer