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Tracing email


VaKo

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Weird little query, some idiot appears to have gotten my email address from my little brother, no issue at first, large red angry text full of words no child should ever hear were a good way of explaining why chain letters sucked. Now the dick has a virus on his computer and is spamming out crap right left and center. Its a hotmail account, so I was wondering if there would be anyway of tracking him down to his ISP and calling them to make a complaint. Traditional methods only seem to work when there using ISP provided mail.

BTW i want to be clear about this, my only intention is to try and report a TOS violation, not hax0r anything.

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Something that used to work extremely well but can be hit or miss these days is embedding some sort of URI reference in a mail to the target address. A unique image, for example, pulled from some server under your own administrative control:

<img src="http://VaKo-is-1337.dyndns.org/images/bait.gif" />

In this case bait.gif could be a 1x1 transparent pixel unnoticed by the user, but enough to generate a request log on your server with his IP.

I say this is hit or miss because modern E-mail clients (of any quality) won't automatically display embedded content. You could also try a hyperlink, although it obviously requires a user to click it.

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You should check out the headers for the email.

The Received: fields tend to be most interesting. If he's actually sending via Hotmail (doubtful) his IP at the time of sending is likely to be in some X-Whatever: field too.

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No need to be careful. You're not going to hack the IP. You need to know what the ISP is that owns it, then file a complaint with them including a timestamp of the event that is as accurate as possible. They can then just scan their logs and see who was on at that time and then take appropriate action.

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Its deffinatly a hotmail address, forwarded the offending crap to abuse@hotmail.co.uk and here's hoping.

Send him/her an email using this service readnotify.com - no need to subscribe, just open a trial for 15 days (free and works).

The service will tell you his ip and even better where he lives :lol:

hope you get it solve

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