Study: Spammers turning blind eye to the law

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Tracing the senders of spam

Can the sender's IP really be hidden?

My understanding is that in order for mail to be transported from one computer to another, there needs to be an SMTP session, and in order for that to be accomplished, the receiving server has to know the sender's IP address, other wise it cannot respond to the sender's requests. Now the receiving server is not the spammer's server, so it does what it has to do and records the sender's IP in a "Received:" header (those using Outlook or Outlook express who don't know what I'm talking about: right-click an email, and chose "properties". You'll see the email headers that usually include several "Received:" fields that record the path the message went through from sender to receiver).

The "Received:" headers show the path the email went through. Spammers often add some faked "Received:" headers, but it's possible to tell the true ones from the faked ones.

Spamcop.net does the header parsing automatically, finds the the IP address of the source, and in addition looks up the email address of the abuse department of the ISP serving that IP address. Even if it's not the spammer's address, but rather the address of some compromised system (like an open relay or a private PC that was "taken over" by a hacker) using spamcop.net to report spam can point ISPs to sources of spam on their systems so they can close these sources.

There's no need to understand email to use spamcop. It's basically paste in your spam, click a button to analize it, then click a button to send a report to the relevant system admins (the sender's admin. Not the recipient's!)

Posted by: hadaso   Posted on: 02/11/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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