Traceroute

Traceroute allows you to see the path that packets of information on the Internet follow to reach a given destination. If you know the name or IP address of a system or machine from which a spam was sent, traceroute will give you information on the service provider through which the spammer's system connects to the Internet. Some knowledge of Internet protocols and routing is required to make the best use of this tool.

Reverse Phone Number Lookups

Many spammers will place a contact phone number to an ansering machine or fax in their otherwise anonymous posts. If the phone number is listed, there are a number of services which let you associate a name and address with the phone numbers. You can then use this to look up further information in one of the databases such as the Four11 Directory Services to obtain additional information.

Four 11 Directory Database Services

Four11 is a major search engine, specializing in lookups of phone numbers, email addresses, web addresses, government sites and addresses and other publicly available information. The service is free, and well worth a bookmark if you haven't made one to it already.

This is another very large email address database with close to 6 million listings. It allows searches by both email address and last name. I suspect that many of these names are gathered from Usenet newsgroups - the same source used by people who provide name lists to spammers.

This is a pointer to downloadable Windows software. Nslookup is a tool for querying the Internet name service database to associate a domain name with an IP address and vice versa. On occasion, spammers will use IP addresses rather than domain names in headers, or it may be necessary to locate the mail server for a particular domain name. Proper use of this tool requires some knowledge of the Internet Domain Name Service.