June 24, 1999

To Protest Unwanted E-Mail, Spam Cop Goes to the Source

By J. D. BIERSDORFER

o you ever find yourself wading through dozens of claims of baldness cures and offers to "Make Money Fast at Home!!!" while looking for E-mail in your In box from people you actually know? Is there any way to fight back against these unwanted spammers, who often hide behind hard-to-trace or false addresses?

	Larry Davis for The New York Times
	Julian Haight, creator of Spam Cop, a Web site that tracks the origin of unsolicited junk E-mail.

Please meet the Spam Cop. Created by Julian Haight, a 27-year-old computer consultant in Seattle, Spam Cop ( spamcop.net) is a Web site that lets you track spam -- unsolicited junk E-mail sent out in bulk -- back to its source and then complain about it to the proper authorities.

After providing the site with a return E-mail address, you simply paste a junk E-mail message you have received into a form on the site and click on a button. Spam Cop dissects the message's header field to find out where it came from. It then sends a copy of the unwanted mail to the network administrator of the Internet service provider the spammer is using, along with a crisply worded letter of complaint from you about being spammed.

Mr. Haight said that 127,744 such letters from users were sent from the Spam Cop site last month alone. The site also contains a discussion forum about spam, links to spam-fighting resources, a list of known spammers and a well-written Frequently Asked Questions section.

Reporting spam on the Spam Cop site is free. But for $15, you can sign up for a Spam Cop membership that will bring you a set of E-mail filters that can weed out messages sent from known spammers and an electronic newsletter with updates and information about battling spam.

The site may not prevent all spam but may help take a bite out of it. Many Internet providers have a no-spam policy for subscribers, and many will close accounts opened by bulk mailers if they get complaints about spam coming from an address.

A program automatically unmasks spammers.

Mr. Haight created the Spam Cop site after being told in an on-line discussion that tracing E-mail back across the Internet to its source couldn't be done. "I was reading a newsgroup, the wish list for Netscape, and I suggested that they put a button in the mail client that will let you report spam," he recalled. "I was immediately shot down."

His detractors told him that E-mail couldn't be tracked automatically because of the number of E-mail programs and other variables involved. "So immediately I thought, 'That's not true,' " Mr. Haight said. "I've got to prove them wrong."

He went to work on a program that used a number of networking utilities for the Unix operating system (used by most E-mail servers) to extract information about an E-mail header. He created the first version of the site in just a few weeks.

Spam Cop has been on the beat since September 1998, and Mr. Haight said that the complaint letters had helped close many spammers' E-mail accounts. "A few of the spammers have called me themselves, trying to get me to cease and desist my operation, so I know that something is working," he said. "They're feeling the pain."

Mr. Haight, however, is standing firm against spammers who claim that he's hurting their ability to do business. "They like to threaten," he said. "All my subscribers are individual people who decided to send E-mail, and I just facilitate that."

---

Related Sites
These sites are not part of The New York Times on the Web, and The Times has no control over their content or availability.

• SpamCop Web site