On 1/25/99, Bob Cumbow <cumbr[_at_]perkinscoie.com> wrote:
>
> This is for the purpose of referring an individual who has written me
> about an apparent defamation campaign being carried on against her by
> a Web site.
As luck would have it, yesterday there was an article in the Business section of the L.A. Times entitled "A Message for Spammers: Beware," by Karen Kaplan. Although the article focuses on unwanted e-mail some of the same strategies might be valuable to your correspondent. Here are the more relevant parts of the article. Forgive me if there are typos, I scanned it, did a quick spell check on badly scanned words, copied and pasted into this message. -- Oliver
Oliver Seely
<oliver[_at_]dhvx20.csudh.edu>
For more than a year, I was able to tolerate occasional junk e-mail. My solution was simple: just hit the delete key.
But now that the volume of incoming unsolicited e-mail -- also known as spam -- has mushroomed from a few a week to a dozen a day, simply deleting messages is no longer sufficient. Now I'm looking for revenge.
The Web is full of others who have had it with spammers. Some have posted step-by-step instructions for tracing the source of spam and offered suggestions for lodging effective complaints.
Paul Vixie, chief technology officer of Cupertino, Calif.-based Vayu Communications, maintains the "Realtime Blackhole List" <http://maps.vix.com/rbl/> of networks that are friendly or neutral to spammers.
Network administrators can block incoming e-mail from the suspect sources by subscribing to Vixie's list.
Bright Light Technologies, the San Francisco spam - fighting company backed by Internet guru Esther Dyson, created a Spam Calculator <http://www.brightlight.com/cgi-bin/spamulator2.cgi> to highlight the global cost of junk e-mail. Skeptics can estimate how many spammers are out there and how many messages they send, then watch as the worldwide cost of spam runs into the millions of dollars.
One frustrated spam recipient named Jeremy J. Olson has created a Web site <http://home.ici.net/olson/spam/kills.html> listing the names of the Net's top "spam busters" and the number of junk e-mailers those people have had kicked off their Internet service providers. The No. 1 spam buster, Travis G., has racked up at least 475 kills, according to the site.
(snip)
The next step is to visit InterNIC, the organization that registers Internet domain names. At <http://rs.Internic.net/cgi-bin/whois/>, visitors can type in a domain name ( or a few other possible identifiers) and find out who owns it.
This site is understandably popular, and the server is sometimes too busy to perform a search. A search of marketingsecrets.net showed it is registered to a British Columbia firm called Internet Marketing Secrets, and that imarket2001.net belongs to an Oakland company called Internet Square. Contact names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses are listed for each company.
You can do more digging by checking out the IP, or Internet protocol, numbers that sometimes go with the domain names. Simply type the IP numbers into the InterNIC search engine and see what you get.
(snip)
InterNIC also lists the "domain servers" used by each domain. These domain servers are typically Internet service providers or Web hosting systems, and InterNIC provides contact information for them as well. But the accuracy of that information depends on the honesty of domain name owners, and a determined spammer could forge that as well.
(snip)
If none of this helps identify the spammer's Internet service provider, one last trick is to use Traceroute, which can trace the Internet path from one computer to another. Head to <http://www.ixa.net/cgi-bin/trace/> and type in the IP number that goes with the domain name server listed by InterNIC.
In this case, it took 11 steps to get from my computer to the domain name server for marketingsecrets.net. Therefore, the IP number listed in the 10th step is most likely the ISP for marketingsecrets.net. A quick search at ARIN revealed that the IP number belongs to a Michigan firm called Diverse Service Corp. It included a phone number and e-mail address.
(snip)
Now for the really satisfying part: writing a complaint letter.
An effective letter is firm but polite. (Netiquette dictates that spam victims refrain from long rambling diatribe.) Ask the spammers to remove you from their mailing list and remind them that the law requires them to comply. You can also tell spammers that their unsolicited messages waste your time and computer resources and that you won't be doing business with them now or in the future.
By writing to the spammer, you are revealing your e-mail address. But this should be less risky than sending a message to a "Reply to:" address that is set up to capture incoming e-mail addresses for the next bulk mailing.
It's also a good idea to let Internet service providers know that one of their customers is sending junk e-mail and to ask them to put a stop to it. Many ISPs -- especially the big ones -- have policies prohibiting spamming as an abuse of network resources, and they are eager to kick offenders off their networks.
Spam busters recommend e-mailing a complaint to abuse@, postmaster@ and root@ at each of the domains that is involved with a junk e-mail. To help them track down the spammer, include a copy of the original junk e-mail that contains all of the headers.
(snip)
It may be more satisfying, report a spammer to the proper authorities and let the professionals do the rest.
General scams and fraud can be reported to the National Fraud Information Center by calling (800) 876-7060, sending an e-mail to fraud info[_at_]psinet.com or filing a report at the group's Web site at <http://www.fraud.org/>. Scam-related spam can also be forwarded directly to the Federal Trade Commission at uce[_at_]ftc.gov, although people interested in filing a more formal complaint can do so at <http://www.ftc.gov/ftc/complaint.htm>.
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