Spam busting

[bktheirregular]

I've decided to take a new tack on spam. Someone got hold of my addy and is starting to send out porn spam and marketing dren to my account.

The latest one left a telephone number to call, and I'm taking advantage of it - none of these automated systems where you give out your address and pray they're honest about removing it. No, I am going to try and get a person on the line. And pry out of them where they got my address. And a contact number for those people. And exact a promise to remove my addy from their list.

I'm gonna keep a record of this, I think. Notes as it happens. And I figure if I put it up here as it happens, it will create a nice paper trail.

Anyway.

The offender was identified as Mark, addy hqcwric627@hotmail.com - contact telephone (877) 284-8258, remove-me telephone (888) 529-1703.

Close entry.

Comments

[weirdweb.livejournal.com]

Leaving phone numbers to call now, are we? That's new. You usually just get an e-mail address or a link to a form which probably is only there to validate your address, not remove it.

I don't know about the return e-mail addy, though. You might want to view full headers and feed the originating IP through a WHOIS query (I use http://www.arin.net/whois ) to get the ISP or hostname it REALLY originated from. Most of these places have an abuse contact. I did that for a while until my old Hotmail account got so flooded with spam it wasn't worth it. But that did keep the deluge down a bit.

Hm. Good call - thanks.

[bktheirregular]

The header was like this:

Return-Path: < hqcwric627@hotmail.com >
Received: from  str-m04.mail.aol.com (str-m04.mail.aol.com [172.21.28.100]) by air-xb02.mail.aol.com (v93.8) with ESMTP id MAILINXB21-30923eae9a5c27c; Tue, 29 Apr 2003 11:29:32 2000
Received: from  rly-xb02.mx.aol.com (rly-xb02.mail.aol.com [172.20.105.103]) by str-m04.mail.aol.com (v92.16) with ESMTP id RELAYIN10-b3eae99cc1a5; Tue, 29 Apr 2003 11:27:08 2000
Received: from  213.106.55.25 ([211.45.202.181]) by rly-xb02.mx.aol.com (v93.8) with ESMTP id MAILRELAYINXB21-8d3eae99b9378; Tue, 29 Apr 2003 11:27:01 -0400
Received: from 36.185.61.158 ([36.185.61.158]) by f64.law4.hotmail.com with QMQP; Apr, 29 2003 7:19:16 AM -0800
Received: from unknown (149.89.93.47) by rly-xr02.mx.aol.com with NNFMP; Apr, 29 2003 6:24:33 AM +1100
From: Mark < hqcwric627@hotmail.com >
To: bktheirregular@aol.com
Subject: ADV: Website Submissions to Search Engines enshp
Sender: Mark < hqcwric627@hotmail.com >
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="part1_200304291127.01LQHWFa1525"; charset=ISO-8859-1
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2003 08:26:55 -0700
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4522.1200
Message-ID: < 200304291127.01LQHWFa15258@rly-xb02.mx.aol.com >
MIME-Version: 1.0

And the arin.net WHOIS query kicked back Stuyvesant High School.

Guess it's time to make a phone call...

[wiliqueen.livejournal.com]

Okay, this looks like fun. Keep us posted.

(Hoping that it's not all about somebody trying to get Mark in trouble because Mark blew the curve on the physics final or something...)