Different people mean different things when they say spam. When I say spam, I mean Usenet postings that are designed to advertise a product or a website or a money-making scheme. We feel very strongly about spam in alt.binaries.pictures.grotesque because ABPG was created to get away from the spammers who trashed alt.binaries.pictures.tasteless. The object of this page is to teach Internet users what they need to know to identify the source of a spam and send e-mails to the people who have the power to make sure the same spammer doesn't hit ABPG again. I would like for every single person who reads ABPG on a regular basis to know what's on this page and flood the people who are responsible for spam with effective e-mails. Since I started applying the techniques on this page on a regular basis, I've gotten dozens of messages from ISPs telling me that the spammer I complained about just got kicked off their system. I've also gotten a lot of polite apologies from spammers who promise not to spam ABPG again.

Despite the fact that the vast majority of the e-mail responses I get are friendly and apologetic, it's not a good idea to e-mail spammers with an e-mail address that you want to keep for very long. Not only will they sell your address to other spammers, they might get revenge on you by mailbombing you (which has happened to me twice) or by using your e-mail address as the return address on some of their spam. So you should sign up for a free e-mail account from someone like Yahoo, which you can do by clicking here.

The three most effective things you can do to stop a spammer from spamming again are:

1. Complain to the ISP that the spammer used to post the spam (that is, complain to the administrator of the news server the spammer used).
2. Complain to the administrator of the website being advertised in the spam.
3. Complain to the spammer's "upstream" service provider. This is the ISP that the spammer's website is on. A web site with a name like pregnantlesbians.com has to rent net access from another company, called an upstream service provider. Most upstream service providers have anti-spam policies and will immediately stop spamming by their customers when they find out about it.

If you want to complain to the administrator of the news server a message was posted from, start by looking at the full header on the message. One of the lines in the full header says "Path:" followed by a long list of names like news.ispnews.com. The last name on that list is usually where the post originated. The best way to complain is to forward the entire post, including the entire header, to abuse@ the server the post came from. So if it came from news.ispnews.com, forward it to abuse@ispnews.com. The person you're writing to probably had nothing to do with the spam, so you should be polite. You don't have to add anything to the post you're complaining about, but if you do, say something like, "All erotica and commercial posts are off-topic and unwelcome in alt.binaries.pictures.grotesque."

Complaining to the news server usually doesn't do much good (but it can inconvenience the spammer temporarily), so you also need to write to the owner of the site being advertised, and their upstream service provider. You can go to http://www.networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois/ and do a whois search. You just type in the name of the domain, like smutview.com (without the http://www. part), and it should come back with e-mail addresses for the site's administrators (if the site is registered outside the US, it won't be at InterNic, though). Again, you should forward the whole post, with header, to the "administrative contact" and politely add the following message:
All commercial posts and erotica are off-topic and unwelcome in alt.binaries.pictures.grotesque. The FAQ can be found at: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Peaks/8351/abpg_faq.html.

There's a freeware program that can be helpul, called NetLab. It does whois searches, DNS lookups and trace routing. Click here to download it.

If writing to the administrator of the site the spam is advertising doesn't work, you need to find the site's upstream service provider. To do that, go to NetLab's "trace" function and enter the name of the website (for example, www.smellmyfinger.com). (Be sure to check the boxes that say "Resolve IP address" and "Parallel Trace.")

In the column that says, "Host Name" you'll get a long list of names. The last one should be the one you typed in. The last name on the list before the site you're tracing is their upstream provider. So if you're looking for www.dirtypictures.com and you do a trace, you might find that the last host name before dirtypictures.com is something.exodus.net. That means exodus.net is their upstream provider and you can forward all their spam to abuse@exodus.net. If you do that and your message comes back to you with a note saying there's no such address, you should do a whois search on the upstream provider and send an e-mail to their administrative contact. I'll add more later on what to do when the upstream doesn't respond to the problem.

A lot of spammers will give DNS numbers for their websites. So it might say something like, "Come to http://209.160.120.196/sex.html." In a case like that, you can enter 209.160.120.196 in the trace function on NetLab and find out who the upstream is. If you want to find out who actually administers the site, go to the DNS function in NetLab and enter the number there. Sometimes it won't be able to tell you anything, but sometimes it will come back with a domain name that you can do a whois search on. Even if it doesn't give you a domain name, the trace function will still work and you should write to their upstream.

Another thing that's extremely easy to do is to look for spam that advertises sites on geocities.com, aol.com, xoom.com, tripod.com or angelfire.com. If you forward the spam to one of those domain's abuse@ addresses, they'll usually shut the site down right away, especially if it's pornographic. (Unfortunately, places with names like www.pantysniffers.com don't usually work like that!) If you write to these companies, be polite.

Click here to go to a list of ABPG-related links, or click below to go to my home page.