Traceroute and Spam
Please read this if you are using our traceroute tool to track down spammers.Hi there. We hate spam as much as you do. However, some folks out there have been using our traceroute tool to abuse innocent ISPs in their zeal to fight spam.
This tool tells you the path from Opus One, a consultancy in Tucson, Arizona, to any address on the Internet.
When you use this tool, you may see many other ISPs between us and the spammer. Just because those ISPs appear on this listing does not mean that they are responsible for providing internet service to the mail abuser.
You may have been told something like
"the last line you see is the ISP responsible."This may or may not true. There are many cases where the last ISP you will see is completely unrelated to the spammer. In particular, if the spammer is so notorious that they have been put on one of the real-time black hole lists, you may hit an ISP which simply discards our packets headed towards the spammer.
Please, Please, Please, Please do not send mail to each and every ISP you see on this list. Do not send mail to us; do not send mail to Wetwork Networks; do not send mail to Login Internet; do not send mail to Limelight Networks (llnw); and do not send mail to UUNET. These are all companies which provide us (Opus One) with Internet service, and they are getting mighty pissed off about getting mail accusing them of harboring spammers when their only crime is providing Opus One Internet service.
Sometimes these other companies are responsible for providing service to spammers---they are huge ISPs, there must be some spammers out there on those networks. We still don't want to hear about it. If you want to complain, please be sure that you're complaining to the right people.
If erroneous complaints like these continue, we will be forced to remove our traceroute page from the Internet. And that would be a bad thing, because we provide people over 10,000 traceroutes a month.
So be smart, and if you have questions about who is harboring a spammer, call your ISP.
The folks at Email Abuse, a consumer advocacy site about spam, might also be able to help you. Or at least inform you.
If you'd like to run TRACEROUTE on your own machine, this is possible. If you have a Mac, you can grab a copy of WhatRoute, which I have tested at least once and will work for you as long as you have OpenTransport. I also got a bit of promo-mail from someone who thinks that Windows users should be using Visual Route, which I have not tried.
© 2002 Opus One . Site by DesertNet Designs
