Arty Posted February 3, 2004 Posted February 3, 2004 Are not spam reports sent anonymously? I had a call earlier from a person complaining that I had him blacklisted. His email message was indeed reported to spamcop and yet a few hours later this guy contacted me! How did he know who 'grassed him up'? Isn't this defeating the object of spam reporting? How best to harvest valid email addresses than to send out spam, wait for the blacklisted reports and see who squealed to the spamcops.
Ellen Posted February 3, 2004 Posted February 3, 2004 Yes the reports are sent anonymously but depending on the mailer there may be indentifying info in links in the reported mail; in the headers encoded, in x-headers etc or it may be as simple as it's a small list and they looked at the headers and you are the only person at a given ISP/hosting company. So how did he know your phone number?
Arty Posted February 3, 2004 Author Posted February 3, 2004 They got my website name from the spam report sent to them. It was an (automated) link request which listed the my name a couple of times in the message body. So what should I do next time? Just delete all references to mysite.com in the header and body? I have often wondered about unsubscribe links e.g. vvv.spammers.com/cgi-bin/unsubscribe.cgi?user=myemailaddress[at]me.com should I remove myemailaddress from the report as surely this gets sent back to the spammer via the complaint from his ISP?
Arty Posted February 3, 2004 Author Posted February 3, 2004 BTW, is it possible to dry run a report first? Like just to see what information about the spamee will be possibly sent to the spammer?
Dave_L Posted February 3, 2004 Posted February 3, 2004 There's a Preview Reports button you can use to see exactly what the report(s) will look like. If I see obvious identifying information in the spam, I'll usually manually change each occurrence of it to "x" or "MUNGED".
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