These pages are intended for both e-mail users and administrators, with the purpose of increasing their awareness of some ways in which these services are being abused. These abuses include, but are not limited to: massive junk-email distribution, unauthorised third party relaying, illegal contents, 'mail viruses', list servers abuse,...

RedIRIS institutions pay special attention to this problem and initiatives are being coordinated within them to alleviate, if not eradicate, these abuses. All of these initiatives are fully described in the Spanish version of these pages.

So far the English pages are just a switchboard to several excellent sites which already handle this problem:

Useful tools to locate a message origin

• The RIPE database is one of the best of its kind, but only has information about European and some North African networks.
• The ES-NIC database is an excellent point of information for Spanish (*.es) domains. The pages are in Spanish but are straightforward to use.
• InterNIC database with limited information on other networks and domains.
• Nslookup is the standard IP/DNS mapping tool (it's already present on most Unix installations).
• Traceroute lets you trace the path from your network to another.

Resources

• Paul Vixie's excellent Anti-Relay: Stop Third-Party Mail Relay.
• Internet Mail Consortium on spamming, a comprehensive set of documentation and links.
• America Online's FAQ on email abuse.
• FAQ of the list SPAM-L.
• Legal cases against spammers (USA).
• Coalition Against Unsolicited Comercial Email.
• Yahoo guide for anti-spamming software.
• CERN's anti-spamming measures