who are you going to call

Like most email users I get my fair share of spam and other internet crud. Mostly I ignore it, but I received an intriguing email a couple of days ago which purported to be a mailer daemon “Delivery Status Notification” informing me of a failed delivery to some address I had not even heard of. Mostly this sort of junk results from backscatter from mailers responding to spammers spoofing your email address in the outgoing mail. I get a lot of this to the “info@baldric.net” address as I’ve mentioned below.

However, this particular email interested me because the message-id in the headers said it came from a machine calling itself mx1.rlogin.net. Now I own and control that domain and I know that I have no such machine. So I concluded that the machine at the address in question (which looks to be at the end of a commercial cable line) was either deliberately being used incorrectly by its owner, or (much more likely) had been compromised and was being used illegally to send spam mail designed to look like it came from my domain. Either way, I’m not overly happy about that so I decided to contact the ISP and let them know that they might have a customer with a problem.

The normal way to do this is to send email to the “abuse@domain.name” address which is usually listed in the whois record for the network owner. There is even an RFC which codifies this practice. However, on searching a variety of whois records I couldn’t find any obvious address to use. Worse, speculative email to “abuse@the-likeliest-relevant-domain” was simply returned as undeliverable. What to do?

Well as it happens I found a very helpful utility called abuseEmail which automates searches of whois records for likely addresses. Better yet, some helpful people at cyberabuse.org give a web based front end to the abusEmail php script so that you don’t have to run your own.

Permanent link to this article: https://baldric.net/2011/07/18/who-are-you-going-to-call/