Finding user address in AOL spam complaints?
Matt Simpson <[email protected]> Thu, 9 Oct 2008 17:39:08 -0400
| Newsgroups | gmane.mail.ezmlm |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <p06240800c51426d02c05@[128.163.134.241]> |
A few weeks ago, someone here wrote about AOL's new spam-complaint report not providing a clue about which subscriber generated the report. At the time, I hadn't gotten a recent complaint, so I didn't know if something had changed since the last one I had gotten. Today I got an AOL "feedback report". It looks just like the ones I've always gotten. Maybe I'm just lucky and still getting the old-style report. Despite AOL's piss-poor attempt at hiding the user's identity, it's still obvious. The report begins like this: >This is an email abuse report for an email message with the >message-id of [email protected] received from IP address >208.116.11.36 on Sat, 04 Oct 2008 20:26:11 -0400 > >For information, please review the top portion of the following page: >http://postmaster.aol.com/tools/fbl.html >Feedback-Type: abuse >User-Agent: AOL SComp >Version: 0.1 >Received-Date: Sat, 04 Oct 2008 20:26:11 -0400 >Source-IP: 208.116.11.36 >Reported-Domain: crossbo.jmatt.net >Redacted-Address: redacted >Redacted-Address: redacted@ Then it includes the original list message that the user reported as spam, with the word "redacted" in several places instead of the user's screen name. But they missed a couple. In the examples I'm posting, the I have replaced the user's id with asterisks, but as received from AOL, the userid was still there: Return-Path: <redacted-return-34847-********[email protected]> List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:redacted-unsubscribe-********[email protected]> Reply-To: Foxhunters OnLine <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Ironically, what they actually "redacted" in those lines was the list name, not the subscriber's id. It looks like they looked at what was in the To: header, decided that must be the recipient, and "redacted" it everywhere it occurred, instead of the actual recipient. The List-Unsubscribe header is one I add via the qmail-verh patch to qmail-remote. But the Return-Path header should exist in any message. Unless other people are getting reports from AOL that are different from mine, the subscriber's id is still there.