In article , wrote: >
Absolutely.
If you could find them, and if it were legal to do so. Maybe you could do that in Saudi Arabia, but the last time I checked, chopping off fingers was illegal here in the US.
And you don't rely on the IP addresses, either. As has been repeatedly pointed out 90% or more of the spam we're subjected to is proxied through virus-infected home computers and compromised servers. The owners of those systems are no more responsible for sending spam than you would be of making phone calls to Columbia that came from someone tapping your line outside your house.
You could TRY to make a claim about the websites the spam refers to, but those also are extremely short-lived, unauthorized servers often running on the same compromised systems.
Yes, you can tell where the system is that the spam was sent through. But that doesn't tell you WHO sent the spam, only which compromised zombie system they used to relay it through.
It won't tell you how to track down the sender, but you can use it to block further attempts. For instance, my system blocks based on sender IP address and hostname. I block anything that resolves to a hostname that looks like it came from a home system.. basically any hostname whose left-most portion contains 4 sets of numbers separated by '-', or contains any of the strings "client", "dhcp", "dsl", "pool", "ppp" and "user". I also block on a rather large list of IP ranges.
Yes, I'm sure it works. But there's a HUGE difference between legitimate web surfers and scum spammers. Web surfers don't tend to hide their activities.
John Meissen snipped-for-privacy@aracnet.com
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: What you say is true, however if the top three or four(?) lines of the header -- let's call it the 'true From line' points at you, then you have a problem. Either you are the spammer or you are a spam-enabler (by virtue of proxies, open relays, etc.) You would not be up there in the top lines if you were neither a spammer nor an enabler, now would you? Either way, you need to have your ass kicked hard. Kicked harder for the spammer than for the enabler I guess, but kicked none the less. Anyone can be 'From:' anyone else, just as I could write a perfectly awful letter to our resident President Dubya and sign your name and address to it. But if the letter was postmarked "Independence 67301 KS" and _you_ disavowed any knowlege of it, most simpletons and brain diseased old Tin Hat fools would agree it _probably_ was not your doing. PAT]