Huh? Who Sent That? - How To Find Out What Server Really Sent That E-Mail And How To Deal With Spam

This post is day 2 of the A Week Of Staying Safe series.

It is really easy to send an e-mail as someone else. In fact, it is as easy as changing one little option in your e-mail clients options. When you first set up your client do you remember filling in an “e-mail” field? Well, you can change the address to whatever, and that will make the “from:” address for the e-mail look different.

It is even easier to fake an address via internet applications, which is how most spam occurs. A lot of spammers these days will look for contact forms that use basic mail functions with easily exploited flaws. These flaws let them change the e-mail headers, thus sending e-mails as whoever.

Unless the spammer is somewhat tech-savvy (I suspect many aren’t), chances are they don’t know the IP address of the server that sent it is still part of the e-mail. If you could only get the IP you could contact the server admin and let them know what is going on, but how can that be done?

It’s really quite simple:

Outlook Express

#1: Right click on the message and select properties

#2: Click the details tab.

Apple Mail

#1: Open the e-mail message.

#2: Go to the view menu and select Message->Long Headers.

How To Get The IP

Look for the last “Received:” entry for the e-mail. Usually it will say something like: “Received: from” then the server’s dns name, then the IP address.

Look up the IP on a site like Domain White Pages and send an abuse report to the “OrgAbuseEmail:” e-mail address. If one doesn’t exist look for another address.

If you still can’t find any contact addresses for the IP you can either ignore the e-mail or forward the message to the FTC’s report spam address.

If you still receive spam from that address even after contacting the abuse handler, you should also forward it to the FTC. If you suspect the spam is a result of using a “unsubscribe” link or by subscribing to some service you can file a complaint against the company here.

The only real way to get rid of spam is to get the spammers put in jail and to inform webmasters when their mail scripts are being hijacked.

A Week Of Staying Safe Articles:
Day 1 - The Ultimate Guide To Detecting E-Mail Scams
Day 2 - Huh? Who Sent That? - How To Find Out What Server Really Sent That E-Mail And How To Deal With Spam
Day 3 - Having A Good Host Can Sure Save Your Sanity
Day 4 - Top 3 Ways To Secure MySQL
Day 5 - Avoiding Make Fast Money Affiliate Scams
Day 6 - 17 Ways To Avoid Spyware Forever
Day 7 - Password Rotation

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