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Ohio State University logo Office of Information Technology Technology Support Center (8help)

Reporting Spam to the Originating Internet Service Provider



Spam e-mail originating from outside the University network is outside of the jurisdiction of the Office of Information Technology. The only organization that can deal with the machine sending out the spam is the originator's Internet Service Provider.

In order to know who to contact, we need to know what machine is sending the spam. Please use the following article in order to find the originating IP address:

Once we have the originating IP address we need to know who owns the address and who to contact regarding the spam. This is where the Internet's WHOIS database comes in. WHOIS will give us lots of information that we don't need, but it will also show us the point of contact.

Take the IP address we obtained above, and plug it in to the form on this page: Since most WHOIS requests will return multiple email addresses, we need to know which one is the point of contact for spam. If there is an email address with the word abuse in it (e.g., abuse@domain), then this is who we need to send the spam email to. If there is not an abuse email address, then address your email to the Technical contact in the WHOIS response.

All that is left to do is send the original e-mail with full headers to the address found in the WHOIS search.

For example: The IP address in the article above is 65.25.151.2. Doing a WHOIS search on that address yields that it is a RoadRunner address, and the email address abuse@rr.com is returned with the search.



Current Record: 2596

Create Date: 07-19-2005
Last Reviewed: 04-15-2008
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