easyDNS Tutorial

Section Two - Finding the Service Provider 2

The next thing to do is find out who you are dealing with. A good way to start is to visit anti-spam websites, several of which are listed in the "Related information" section of this tutorial, and search for the domain names in their lists and information. If you find them mentioned as service providers who respond to spam complaints then you've found the perfect people to alert about the spam email. If they are reported as not responsive to such requests, or if they are described as spammers themselves, you will want to find their upstream connectivity provider.

You can apply this test to any of the domains from the headers or spam email. For the domain name gathered from the servername you can also try visiting the website by adding "www." in front of the domain name. If this brings up a service provider's page this again would likely be a good place to direct a complaint.

If you need to find the upstream connectivity provider for one or more of the domain names you can run a test known as a "traceroute." If you have a UNIX or Linux machine connected to the internet you can run this from the command line, while windows users can run "tracert" from the dos prompt utility, and explicit instructions will be available in your manual. Otherwise there are a number of online resources for running such tests which you can find with a simple web search. The output of a traceroute should look something like the below.


  traceroute to example.net (216.200.145.20), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
   1  192.13.123.1 (192.13.123.1)  0.624 ms  0.500 ms  0.409 ms
   2  gw (66.217.19.33)  0.502 ms  0.494 ms  0.473 ms
   3  66-207-201-23.isp.net (66.207.201.23)  1.036 ms  1.026 ms  1.010 ms
   4  vlan906-dist1-tor1.isp.net (66.207.209.169)  3.524 ms  1.835 ms  2.442 ms
   5  srp-6-0-bb2.tor1.isp.net (66.207.209.9)  1.449 ms  1.276 ms  1.214 ms
   6  POS5-0.GW5.TOR2.ALTER.NET (63.104.149.253)  1.833 ms  2.952 ms  2.620 ms
   7  0.so-6-0-2.TOR2.ALTER.NET (152.63.133.74)  2.619 ms  1.919 ms  5.953 ms
   8  0.so-7-0-0.CHI2.ALTER.NET (152.63.68.81)  16.913 ms  16.850 ms  16.850 ms
   9  POS6-0.BR3.CHI2.ALTER.NET (152.63.68.1)  16.830 ms  16.746 ms  16.817 ms
   10  64.125.12.245.provider.net (64.125.12.245)  31.402 ms  31.006 ms  29.462 ms
   11  so-0-0-0.provider.net (64.125.30.138)  36.077 ms  29.967 ms  48.293 ms
   12  so-1-0-0.provider.net (64.125.30.146)  29.924 ms  29.855 ms  30.213 ms
   13  so-4-0-0.provider.net (64.125.30.213)  82.742 ms  82.367 ms  82.246 ms
   14  so-2-0-0.provider.net (64.125.30.90)  126.124 ms  132.436 ms  157.285 ms
   15  216.200.145.20.example.net (216.200.145.20)  81.964 ms  83.200 ms  82.655 ms

This makes a connection from your location to the domain name you include in the traceroute, each number listing a step your machine had to go through to reach the domain name. Above we're looking for example.net, and you note that immediately before you get there you reach servers in the provider.net domain. If you have determined that example.net is the spammer, or a service provider unwilling to act on spam complaints, you would want to contact provider.net.

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