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IDEA: Anti-spam utility generating complaint, running whois to generate data.

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John_textiles:
Spam kills a lot of time.  To complain, I have to run a bunch of whois lookups, for the originating IP, the spammer's domain if the spam is advertising a domain, etc.  Is there any chance of getting a utility which could at least lighten the workload a bit?  Thanks!

mouser:
can you elaborate a little about what kind of tool youd like?

John_textiles:
Elaborate, sure.  I'd like something, anything, that would reduce the effort required to report spam.  The perfect program would do it all, generating a form letter, addressing it to the abuse addresses of the ISP that mailed the spam, the registrar or servers for the site or domain advertised in the spam, the abuse addresses for the spammer's mail provider, etc.  Example.  I get a spam promoting a porn site or MLM scam.  I want the program to automatically run whois on the source IP for the spam mail, the website/domain, and also any domains related to the spammer's contact e-mail address listed on the whois registration of the spammer's site.

So if I get a spam from IP address 65.54.something, meaning it's from Hotmail, I want the abuse addresses for Hotmail to be added to a list of recipients of my complaint letter, which the program will generate (a fill-in form, basically).  If the site, mynakedsisterpicfordrugmoney.com, is registered with Enom, then Enom's abuse address is added.  If the whois info reveals that the registrant is Lenny Smith, with an e-mail address of [email protected], then a whois of that ugly...supplies domain will reveal another contact name and e-mail address, so that at some point we have a real address, rather than an address at a domain the spammer controls.  Obviously, sending a complaint to "[email protected]" won't do us much good, and could even escalate the spam by letting Lenny know your address is active.  It's when we find a [email protected] or at hotmail.com, that we have an address to which we can complain, and at least get his e-mail provider to cut off e-mail service (although the idiots at Yahoo! often argue and send "nope, not from us" form letters, refusing to acknowledge that they're helping a spammer even if the spammer uses his Yahoo! address only for the purpose of registering his domain).

I'd like to have a program that does a recursive and comprehensive search via whois, etc., to figure out all the complaint addresses to which reports can be sent to combat spam.  [email protected] would be an address that would always be included in the list of entities to notify.  Currently, when time and energy permit, I do all that research manually and paste stuff into a simple text file I use as a form letter for my complaint.  It would be so helpful to so many people to be able to automate the process.  Thanks!

mouser:
i think this is a wonderful idea actually -- i'd love to see someone write it.
it would be nice if it could take as input the complete email received, and parse the email headers, etc.  in doing so it could also avoid being tricked by fake "from" fields, etc.

great idea -- i'd really like to see someone here write this, AFTER a comprehensive search to make sure such tools don't exist yet.  it would make a nice addon for email clients too like thebat and firebird.

BinderDundat:
Since a lot of spam comes from hijacked computers, complaints may not do you any good and if there is a real spammer receiving the complaint, they may take a complaint as validation of your email address and then you will get MORE spam.  Illegal? Spammers don't care.

I would like to see an implementation of a spam filter rule that compares the friendly name from the header with user-defined match words.  The spammers don't have most people's names, so you get a blank friendly name. If the filter defined all address book entries and non-"Deleted Items" and "Spam" folder entries as Friends and passed emails with blank friendly names to a spam folder, you would deal with 99+% of the spam.  With a rt-click menu entry that adds the sender of mis-identified spam to the friends list, you can catch the customer service type emails that often get caught in your ISP's filters by setting their spam rules looser and filtering on your email client.  Ideally the filter would delete Spam folder items older than a definable number of days.  Oddly enough, I have never seen this simple approach used.  It should code with a small footprint and ideally be available as a plug-in.

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