[SC-Help] Re: My address in spam From: line

[Roy Lewallen]

Mike Easter wrote:

> Roy Lewallen wrote:
> Subject: My address in spam From: line
> 
> Even tho' I haven't seen one single one of your spambounces, it might be
> useful for me to imagine and describe how you come to get a bounce.
> 
> There is a spammer who is acting in standard spammer fashion, namely
> spewing lots and lots of spams, all of which have bogus Froms, and the
> spam is being injected into user systems via proxy abuse or trojans.
> Those many spams go out to all of those addressees and a great many
> belatedly bounce.  The belatedly boucing ones with your addy in the From
> get into your mailbox.
> 
> If you analyze the spam itself, the /spammer/ 'There is a spammer' is
> 'invisible.  The only things which can be determined are -1- the
> provider for the abused proxy -2- the provider for the spamvertiser.  If
> you notify them, you notify them, else you don't.  The spammer is still
> very busy spamming.  None of that correspondence really 'bothers' him.
> 
> There are some variations on that theme, but that is fundamentally the
> situation.
> 

Yes, thanks, I understand the general scenario, and you've got the 
description right. This particular spammer is selling on-line medication 
as "Canadian Pharmacy" (and probably other names), and uses "Ruslan 
Yavorenko" for registration. According to one source, he also uses "Jeff 
Smart", "Jasmine Hovers", "George Michaels", and "Jonathan West". It 
looks to me like a pretty typical large spammer. What I get is bounces 
due to invalid addresses, out-of-office notifications, messages from 
brain-dead anti-spam programs, and the like. I assume he's using other 
forged addresses as well as mine, so he must be sending out a good 
volume of spam. Although I know how to identify and notify the ISP where 
each spam is coming from, as I said it's not practical. And the process 
for identifying the web host is apparently over my head, but as you say, 
a complaint there wouldn't help anyway. Guess it's just today's life on 
the web.

Roy Lewallen