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eMail Broadcast freeware for home office personal PC | Bounce email
manager
freeware for returned emails |
STOP SPAM |
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You can obtain these tools from a variety of sources. I recommend taking a look at
http://www.tucows.com/ but there are many other sources, such as
http://www.download.com/ and
http://cws.internet.com/
Those addresses have to be linked to the human domain names in a database in order to be useful. If I were typing from a Unix prompt, I would type the commands like this: whois comp-sol.com The point here is that WHOIS can be used in a variety of ways to query the information contained therein. Sometimes, you may get a bewildering response from Internic, but there is usually something further that you can query to track a source of spam. If you don't know how to begin, try just typing in whois "anything" and see what you get. You won't break it or make anyone mad at you. If you query a domain name, say "spamlovers.com" and get a "No Response Found" reply from Internic, that means that it is NOT a legitimate domain name, because Internic has authority over all domain names that end in .com. Same for .net , .org , and .edu . Notice, please that you must enter spamlovers.com and not www.spamlovers.com or spammachine.spamlovers.com to get a positive response.
It is just the last bit of the domain name in front of the dot that we are interested it. The bit in front of spamlovers.com denotes a machine belonging to that organization, but it is named locally, not by Internic. whois comp-sol.com |
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| | The InterNIC Registration Services Host contains ONLY Internet Information (Networks, ASN's, Domains, and POC's). Please use the whois server at nic.ddn.mil for MILNET Information. Let's deconstruct the information and see what it means: Computer Solutions of Kenosha (COMP-SOL-DOM) 2031 22nd Avenue Kenosha, WI 53140 US OK, so this is a supposedly a business, called Computer Solutions of Kenosha, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The "(COMP-SOL-DOM)" bit indicates that comp-sol.com is indeed the domain name. Please bear in mind that spammers are becoming educated about domain names and whois. They often put bogus information in when they register with Internic to get their domain name. That's against the rules, but Internic won't do anything about it at this time. We live with what is. Still, many times this information will be correct. If nothing else, Internic has to have a way to bill the domain. If the information given is totally bogus, the spammer probably intends not to pay the bill, but merely to use the domain name until it expires, and then register a new one. Let's move on: Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Zone Contact: Hmm, happens to be me, doesn't it. Well. Please don't take me too literally. We also have a telephone number to call if we wish to register a complaint that way. Record last updated on 06-Sep-97. This bit is not too exciting. It is as it appears, showing us when the domain was created, and when it was last changed. NOTE: Remember our last lesson about DejaNews ? If the "Record last updated" date is fairly recent, this would be a good time to search for the offending domain name using Dejanews http://www.dejanews.com to see if any other anti-spammer has posted similar WHOIS information. As a spammer hops from ISP to ISP, they take their domain names with them, and that will show up. Just a tiny bit of information, but it may help to prove to your satisfaction that a spammer is indeed a spammer, and that a particular domain is or is not a spamhaus. It's the little things... Domain servers in listed order: Finally, we have the bit about the Domain servers. A domain server is simply the machine that does lookups for a particular domain name when someone sends anything to that domain, like when you go to a web page or when you send mail to a particular domain. In this case, if anyone goes to a web page at www.comp-sol.com, their request will be "looked up" by one or both of the machines above. This is important, because a spammer may receive his upstream account (or feed) from one source, and have another source do his DNS or Domain Name Service. It could be another source to complain to. Many times, when you are dealing with a spammer, you will see this: Domain servers in listed order: |
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We tend not to believe that there are any legitimate domains hosted by Cyberpromo. When you see this, it is like swimming in the ocean and seeing a dorsal fin rise up out of the water and start towards you.
whois 156.46.104.1 This in itself doesn't give us much information (In fact, this information is out of date, and needs to be updated.) Ah well, another task, another day. What's more important than spam-fighting? So, we can look for the owner of the license in question by stripping off the last digit of the IP address and replacing it with a zero. In this case we would do: whois 156.46.104.0 OK, so we didn't get a match. Still, someone owns the IP range in question. So, now we take off the last two IP "octets" and replace both of them with zeros. Thus: whois 156.46.0.0 Here is some useful information! We see that the actual IP range (often called a "Class C license") is owned by someone else entirely. In this case, it is owned by alpha dot net corp, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We have a contact name and e-mail address, and we have a telephone number.
Remember, this will be an upstream provider for the spammer in question, and possibly not spammers themselves. We phrase our complaint accordingly, so as to not offend the good guys.
USING WHOIS WHEN THERE ARE MULTIPLE RESULTS: Sometimes, when we use www.whois.net we get many responses, not just one. Here is an example: whois mattocks And sure enough, there are instructions right there as to how to narrow down your search. Simply type in an "!" followed by the information shown in the parenthesis. In my case, it would be: whois '!BM561' and that would bring up my information.
FOREIGN WHOIS SEARCHES: What about domains located outside the US? Well, our information is a bit spotty there. There are equivalents of Internic outside of the US, and they work the same way. Some of them can be searched using the WHOIS tool, but just telling it to point itself at a different database. Other times, a search of the web using something like www.yahoo.com will bring you to a web page that will let you do a foreign whois search directly from that web page. List of foreign servers snipped - Sam Spade handles these for you. Freeware download at www.samspade.org
That concludes the lesson for today.
Please feel free to throw roses or brickbats, as you see fit. I maintain copyright and transfer all other rights to the public.
Best Regards, Notes:
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