Dodgy Emails

kenns

Could someone please help me, How can you trace an Email, like were it came from, is it very difficult, as I would love to trace some sxxxxxxxxx who sends these out it is so annoying. Thankyou in anticipation.

giraffe69

If you use Outlook or similar you can right click the email and select properties which will gvie you the Internet headers including original sender BUT it is not that hard for these to be forged.

fiendishlyclever

kenns wrote: »

Could someone please help me, How can you trace an Email, like were it came from, is it very difficult, as I would love to trace some sxxxxxxxxx who sends these out it is so annoying. Thankyou in anticipation.

Much dodgy spam (unsolicited email) is sent from computers infected with malware. (It never ceases to amaze me how little care some people take with their online security or how little they know about the basics of internet security). In these cases there is nobody to contact since the computer originating the message will have no idea where it came from.

As previously mentioned the actual contact details will be faked.

Best solution is to use a decent spam filtering solution like gmail's as it filters these out really well.

Ximian

What email client are you using? There are different ways to view the full headers in email clients, the full headers should display the originating IP Address. As already mentioned, most spam is sent from a machine that is part of a botnet, spammers won't use their own ISP to send spam for obvious reasons. There's not that much you can do unfortunately, if you do trace the IP Address to a particular ISP you could try sending an email to the ISP's abuse address and report that you are receiving spam from a host in their network. Hopefully, the ISP might do something but don't hold your breath.

ISPs need to step up and take an active part in controlling botnets, or at least, like ZEN Internet has done, inform the customer that their machine is infected/part of a botnet: http://support.zen.co.uk/kb/Knowledgebase/Potential-Security-Issue-Detected-notification-e-mail

prowla

There's little value in tracing where it came from, other than to know.
In all honesty, nobody much cares and nobody can do much about it.
If you ISP and then sites you are a member of con do some osrt of blocking, then that's great, and you can set up junk rules/blocked senders, and so-on.

birkee

prowla wrote: »

There's little value in tracing where it came from, other than to know.
In all honesty, nobody much cares and nobody can do much about it.
If you ISP and then sites you are a member of con do some osrt of blocking, then that's great, and you can set up junk rules/blocked senders, and so-on.

I kept getting emails from somewhere in Panama, which I put a block on. Trouble is, they seems to have lots of email addresses with one character changed. Think the computer just cycles through them until it finds one that isn't blocked.
Thinking about it, I haven't had one for a loooong time now.

AirCooledHeaven

You used to be able to reliably trace emails by disecting the email headers, but now most spam has forged headers so there's not much point. Also a lot of spam comes from 'hijacked' computers so the apparent sender knows nothing about it anyway. Best not to let it wind you up, just classify it as junk, delete it and move on...