How to report an abusive website?

n the last few days, I got lot of mails from greetingcard.org that I received a greeting card.  But, Gmail has marked them spam and thrown into spam folder.  Usually, I check only few spam messages that I think Gmail has wrongly marked as spam to see whether they are actually spam or not.

 

So, I opened the greetingcard.org mail today and seen that it is actually not coming from greetingcard.org.  From address is looked like this:  greetingcard.org

<webmaster@infinisource.com>.  Someone used loopholes in mailing script of that site or spoofed the mail to send this spam message.

Email read like this:

From above you can see that mail is coming from another site with the user name as greetingcard.org.  It shows the greeting card link as an .exe file, which may contain harmful virus, malware, or adware.

So, how can we report it so that the domain and server can be shutdown and save others from this email attack?

To see the website’s registrar and hosting company details, we need to check the “Who is” of that domain.  “Who is” data contains the domain registrar’s and owner’s details, domain creation date, update date, and expiration details along with name server details, which normally look like ns1.hostingcompany.com and ns2.hostingcompany.com most of the time.

Every domain registrar and hosting company will have a section called “Abuse Department,” which takes care of spam issues from a website and shuts down the domain or hosting when they receive complaints against a domain.

From the above mail, the suspicious website is wings-softbal.com.  Go to the website, IPTools.com or DNSstuff.com from which you can do a whois lookup.  Enter the domain name wings-softbal.com in Domain Whois Lookup section.

It will show the whois information like this.

Whois query shows that the domain registrar is WildWestDomains.com and hosting company is TotalChoiceHosting.com.  Go to WildWestDomains.com and see if there is a link to report a spam site. Fortunately, we can see on the homepage itself a “Report Spam” link in the “Quick Help” section.

Click on that and file a complaint and also forward the spam message you received.

Now, go to TotalChoiceHosting.com and see if there is any link to report Abuse directly.  I was unable to locate a direct link, but there was live online help as well as help through various messengers.  Using any one of it, we can talk to the operator and ask them the way to report the spam.

Luckily, someone has already reported this website and the hosting company is showing a suspended account message.

You may be interested in reading my other tutorials here.

FREE digital magazine subscriptions – Over 200 titles

 

You might have received emails and snail mails from banks to opt for email statements rather than physical printed statements.  Few banks even offered cash prizes and free goodies to the customers who have opted for email statements as part of their echo-friendly initiatives. There are lot of organizations that are working towards echo-friendly things.  GoReadGreen is also a site that is working towards promoting digital magazines by which, they think, can reduce the printed version of the magazines and save the trees.

 

As a part of their “Read Green Initiative”, they are offering free one year subscription to over 200 popular magazines like MIT’s Technology Review, Popular Science, Reader’s Digest, Popular Science, Playboy Mexico, Penthouse, Interior, Yoga, iPhone Life, etc.  All magazines will be available for reading online and offline through Zinio.

They say, “many groups and associations are dedicated to exploring earth-friendly efforts such as recycling programs, reducing newsstand distribution and ensuring printing is done on recycled paper.”

Click this link to see all the magazines available.  Click “More Magazines” at the bottom to see the next set.  You can alternatively browse by category, which are available on the left side.

It currently allows only one magazine subscription per email address.  There is a hack to register for more magazines per email. Subscribe first using the original email address. When your account is created at Zinio and credited with one year free subscription, do not log out.  Go to the magazines list again and register for another book by putting dot somewhere in your Gmail address.  Like, if your original Gmail address looks like yourname@gmail.com, then register the second book with your.name@gmail.com.  By default, Gmail ignores dots in your email address.  So your.name, your.na.me, you.r.name are same as yourname.  But, do not spam this offer, only subscribe to the books that you really need.