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.