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Spam is Evil

what is spam.pl?

Struggle against the Internet disease called spam, by complaining to all sites that allow relaying through their mail servers.

spam.pl is a perl script that extracts all relaying hosts from the headers of a spam mail and sends a complaint mail to all the responsible mail server administrators.

spam.pl is released under GPL, the GNU General Public License, which means you're free to change and redistribute it as long as you keep the source available.

There is no warranty, neither expressed nor implied, that spam.pl would do what it is said to do. It is up to you to use it.

features

spam.pl allows you to

  • Use your own complaint message
  • Enter your own list of friendly hosts (probably the friendly hosts that relayed the mail to you)
  • You should also instruct spam.pl what email-address it should put in the From: line when it mails its complaints.
  • Run the script without sending any mail to see what receivers it could extract.
  • Run the script with only one specified receiver, so that you can mail yourself and see what it looks good.
  • Invoke the script from inside your favorite mail program. Just pipe the whole mail including headers into this script. You can of course just save the whole mail first and then pipe it manually into this script.
  • Complain through the abuse.net service.
  • Resolves IP-only addresses
  • Optionally extract host names to complain to from the mail body's http:// links.
  • Can be made to use the whois.abuse.net lookup service.

Some Ideas To Work On

  • unresolved IP-addresses can be checked with whois and/or traceroute
  • send the open relays' IP addresses to orbs.org and/or other similar organizations

updates

New versions versions are always uploaded to sourceforge and info is posted at freshmeat.

results

Some admins get angry, as you can follow this discussion. It turned out they did own one of the domains listed in the headers of a spam mail...

Many administrators appreciate a good abuse report, as a few of the responses I've received prove.

Ideas, bugs or suggestions?

Mail the mailing list!

This is an open source project, we rely on feedback and ideas from people like you!