Spam

Please stop blocking our e-mail

Occasionally someone will believe that we are ignoring the e-mails they are sending to us. The only e-mail we would ever ignore are e-mails asking questions about our freeware or abusive e-mails. All other cases are most probably due to spam filters rejecting our e-mail responses.  If you are not getting a response from us after two business days, check to ensure that your spam filter or your ISP's filter is not rejecting e-mail from us.

We do not spam

Occasionally people mistakenly accuse us of sending spam. We don't send spam of any sort. Similarly, people sometimes believe we are sending them virus-containing emails. We have never been infected by such viruses.

Sometimes people will receive spam that has one of our email addresses in the From line. Most spammers use forged From addresses. All modern email viruses now always use forged From addresses picked from the infected machines address book or even the browser cache. You must know how to understand email headers to realize this.

Take a look at the following spam header:

Return-Path:
Received: from compuserve.com (p50929EB4.dip.t-dialin.net [80.146.158.180])
by alfa.nre.vic.gov.au (8.12.9-20030924/8.12.9) with SMTP id i1AMAhg2029169
for ; Wed, 11 Feb 2004 09:10:55 +1100 (EST)
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2004 22:20:03 +0000
From: cmatrix@cyber-matrix.com
Subject: greetings postcard WZYEzONJGt
To: Karl
References:
In-Reply-To:
Message-ID:
Reply-To: Bigal
Sender: Cyberpupz
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit


This spam above actually resulted in our web site being shut down by disturbingly incompetent web administrators for a few days in Feb 2004. Although the From line does indicate a CyberMatrix email address (the address was actually no longer being used) you need examine the header to tell where the spam actually came from. Look for the first Received line where the e-mail was first handed off to your server. [Most emails will have more than one Received line.] Received lines after that may have been forged and therefore cannot be trusted. In this case the spam originated from a CompuServe account in Germany. To determine this you need to find out who manages the IP address in the received line. The IP address is a series of 4 numbers separated by periods. In this case it is 80.146.158.180. Plug this IP address into a utility like Sam Spade and find out who controls this IP block. If Sam Spade says the IP belongs to IANA this means the last received line is invalid. So in this case you must actually look at the IP address in the preceding Received line.

Also, you could drop the entire spam into SpamCop's report form and complain to the actual senders of your spam.