[LI] Re: Linux India Digest V1 #310

["Suresh Ramasubramanian" <Suresh@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Oh My God.

> I was thinking of an email tracker, is there one existing? could some
> one suggest the RFCs for SMTP and yell out where i could find it ?
> 
> thanks jiju

RFCs for SMTP (RFC 822 et al) can be found at http://www.faqs.org 
(in html form), ftp.sunet.se etc etc.

However, your "email tracker" is NOT practicable.  If you are 
thinking of all those chain mails you get which say 

"MS and Disney (or some other company) have merged, so this is 
Microsoft's new email tracking system, fw it to everyone you know 
and you'll get $$$ for each fwd"

or something like that - don't forward it :-)  It is a hoax.  EMail 
cannot be tracked across multiple forwards.

However, if by mail tracking you mean finding where a mail sent to 
you has actually come from (say a spam mail - where there is a lot 
of header forgery) - try reading the headers (press h in pine / mutt 
etc / view - headers - all in Netscape, ... etc etc)

That displays all headers (and check for the rdns lookup to give the 
actual originating ip addr.

for ex 

Received from fakedomain.com ([smtp.actualdomain.net 
(xxx.xx.xx.x)) by open.relay.server.net .... etc etc

See http://spam.abuse.net  or http://www.cauce.org for more 
details re this.  Be warned however - building a script to parse 
headers / track mail is not as easy as it sounds - 

I happen to know several Unix gurus who have tried scripts to parse 
and analyze headers of spam mails (usually forged headers).  
These failed to give totally accurate results.  The human brain still 
remains the best parser :-)

One such Unix guru is the author of Unix for Dummies / Internet for 
Dummies - John Levine.  He is also postmaster of 
http://www.abuse.net - an excellent anti spam resource.

---s


Suresh Ramasubramanian, CAUCE India
Suresh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx | Suresh@xxxxxxxxxxx
Stop Spam | Join CAUCE | http://www.cauce.org
Phone: +(91-40)3736553/3745398 | eFax: +(1-603)590-5437
    Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for
    dinner. Liberty is two wolves attempting to have a sheep for
    dinner and finding a well-informed, well-armed sheep.

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