Some abuse reporting tools
If you get a lot of junk messages, it can be a time-saver to use a script
that helps to create a suitable complaint and mails it off.
IMPORTANT
All of these programs can only make a simple-minded guess at the source
of an e-mail message.
Most spam now has forged headers with faked To:, From:, Reply-To: and
other message headers.
Do not mail off a complaint to every domain that
appears in a message, since that will just annoy system managers who had
nothing at all to do with the problem.
You'll have to learn a little about reading message headers so you can
be sure you're complaining to the right place.
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Sam Spade is a
multi-function analysis web site that can decode a message's headers and
make a fairly good guess about where it came from.
It can take a little while to learn, but it's very useful.
b
Spamassassin is a popular
open source filtering system written in perl for Unix systems.
You generally run it from procmail, as mail is being delivered to your inbox.
I use it, and find it quite effective although I had to adjust
its rules and settings to match the spam I get.
It's a spam filter, not a spam reporting system, although you can
tell it to report the spam it finds to collaborative filtering systems
like Vipul's Razor and DCC.
SpamCop
Julian Haight's very popular Spam Cop
is a web-based system that attempts to diagnose where an unwanted message
came from and send off complaints.
Some system managers welcome reports from Spam Cop, others have gotten so
many false alarms that they reject all mail from it.
Abuse.net hosts a mailing list for people interested in developing and
deploying anti-spam tools.
Visit the list's home page for more details
and access to the message archive.
A semi-automated reporting tool that works as an add-in to Mozilla Thunderbird.
Checks a variety of sources to find contact info;
as always, watch out for over-reporting.
Emails are combined now into a single message using multiple recipients.
Ricochet is a perl script for Unix and Linux systems that attempts to
guess the source of a spam message from the headers. It can be
fooled by forged headers, and rather
aggressive about digging up WHOIS info to contact tenuously related
contacts. It keeps its own list of contacts, and uses abuse.net for any
not in the list..
I'd always manually edit its
proposed list of target addresses to remove all of the false hits.
This is a combination of a batch script and a couple of freeware command
level tools for Windows that help track down IP addresses, URLs, hostnames,
and e-mail addresses.
It doesn't attempt to send off complaint messages, but it does help figure
out who's responsible for spam so you know who to report it to.
An open-source distributed filtering system, it collects "signatures" of spam
from users, and distributes them back out to use for filtering.
Your hacks here
If you have abuse reporting tools you'd like to have listed here, send me a
note at update@abuse.net and tell me about them.
Only freely distributable material, please.
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abuse.net home page.
© 1997-2007 I.E.C.C. Updated $Date: 2007/10/17 03:39:13 $
