At 10:59 PM 11/19/98 -0500, Steven J. Sobol wrote:
On Thu, Nov 19, 1998 at 03:25:25PM -0800, Roeland M.J. Meyer wrote:
Ah, but there's the problem and Karl D. is right. The *real* answer is to do away with throw-away accounts. Yes, the provider of the throw-away account knows exactly who the spammer is (I won't go any deeper than that), they have a CC number. If that data matches our customer, that customer becomes $1500US poorer and stops being our customer. Tracing a spam to a particular dail-in port is not easy, but it's do-able. You then know who the provider is/was.
It's actually not that hard for a smallish provider like NACS. I imagine the big dialup wholesale outifts would have quite a bit more work to do, though.
Actually, it is somewhat easier for them. I have it on good authority that the mail admin at AOL gets regular detailed traces from SPAM-L and other private sources. Many of the SPAM complaints not only come with detailed headers, but traceroutes as well. NetCom also benefits from their users in this way. All that is required is to verify the analysis as being valid, check the logs, and move on from there. ___________________________________________________ Roeland M.J. Meyer, ISOC (InterNIC RM993) e-mail: <mailto:rmeyer@mhsc.com>rmeyer@mhsc.com Internet phone: hawk.mhsc.com Personal web pages: <http://www.mhsc.com/~rmeyer>www.mhsc.com/~rmeyer Company web-site: <http://www.mhsc.com/>www.mhsc.com/ ___________________________________________ Who is John Galt? "Atlas Shrugged" - Ayn Rand