[CLUE-Talk] Spam question

[Matt Gushee]

Hi, all--

I have a question about taking action against a spammer. Normally I
just file spam under "spammers," because it doesn't take too much time,
and I'd rather not spend my life in a battle of wits against such scum.
But every now and then if I get too many messages from the same people,
or their tactics are particularly obnoxious, I'll bump them up to 
"egregious spammers," and if they continue I finally take some action.

So anyway, I've got one of the egregious ones now. There seems to be
a couple of related companies sending the mail; their web sites 
(www.omxi.com,www.terminations.net) are both on the same subnet. Most
of the messages carry a Yahoo return address, and the originating host
sometimes pretends to be yahoo.com--e.g., from the headers: 

  Received: from [65.100.139.218] (helo=yahoo.com)
          by mail2.hypermall.com with smtp (Exim 3.16 #2)

This is the earliest Received header. Hypermall.com is a domain name
owned by my ISP. 65.100.139.218 is not a Yahoo IP: traceroute shows
it to be www.omxi.com. So, my questions:

  Am I right in thinking that these messages really have nothing
    to do with Yahoo?

  Is my ISP at fault for accepting messages from a host that falsifies
    its domain name? 
 
Appreciate your sage advice.

-- 
Matt Gushee
Englewood, Colorado, USA
mgushee at havenrock.com
http://www.havenrock.com/