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Other types of spam- what else may we report & how?


washmail

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Is their an option to report spammers who use bots to misuse website form submissions?

Obviously the given email address is very likely to be false, but one or more URLs are often supplied within the forms.

So is it possible to either submit just URL(s) with an explanation in the Extra Notes of the report, or could one perhaps submit the whole form email anyway and report with an explanation?

(In the second instance it would no doubt be best to have first configured mailhosts.)

:unsure: However, perhaps in this case it cannot be considered 'mass-mailing'?

And without a way to trace the source...

Also, are there any other different types of spam anyone would like to comment on...

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Is their an option to report spammers who use bots to misuse website form submissions? ...

Also, are there any other different types of spam anyone would like to comment on...

If I understand the situation correctly that form of spam is certainly outside of the scope of regular SpamCop reporting however you can certainly use the parser to make "manual" reports to the identified spamvertized site's abuse handler. It does seem however that more and more such sites are themselves botnet-hosted. A specialist in "other" spam is Spamhuntress and it may be worthwhile having a look there. A specialist tool for dealing with botnets generally is Complainterator, available from http://www.spamtrackers.eu/downloads/ and discussed in http://forum.spamcop.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=7930 (and there is a user group at http://thecarpcstore.com/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=967). This goes after the domain registration which is an effective approach. It might also be possible to do something through http://www.knujon.com/

As far as what constitutes "spam", that isn't necessarily germaine. If what these pests are using are botnets their activity is illegal in the criminal sense which takes precedence over anti-spam statutes. And the "bulk" requirement is certainly not universal (in Australia and many other countries the relevant word is "commercial" and with both "bulk" and "commercial" there are, no doubt, many counter-intuitive legal niceties to negotiate in any given case if it ever goes that far).

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To effectively report a spammed URL and have any hope of getting that site closed down with any degree of permanance, you need to do several things.

You need to do a DNS traversal to get the nameservers used to handle the domain, as well as the registrar for the domain involved, the registrar for the domains used by the nameservers, and owners of all IP addresses involved.

Next you need to write a clear, concise report, citing all your evidence, as to why the site should be shut down, and what needs to be shut down.

If nameservers are hijacked, spammer run servers, complaints should be sent to those registrars, as well as the owners of all the IPs involved.

There are some automated tools available to help with this, such as the Complainterator, however, I have not had much luck getting this particular tool to work with IE 6. Supposedly it works with Firefox or IE 7, however, since I have neither installed, I can't tell you for sure.

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