Like many of you, I am fed up with unsolicited spam being dumped in my mailbox. These days, all you have to do is make some innocuous comment in a discussion forum and you get bombarded with variegated crap.

I have tried to trace the source of the spam from headers and invariably the cowards have fake spoofed IP addresses.

I would like to fight fire with fire. If I have a disguised IP address then any trawlers for my address would be sent on a wild goose chase.

From your experience, what are the most effective programs for disguising IP addresses?

All contributions are welcome.

OK the receiving of Spam mail has nothing to do with what your IP address is.
It's completely based on your e-mail address.
The best way to avoid/minimize the spam impact is to setup a web based mail account purely for forum sign ups.
Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail all have excellent Spam filters and you can even setup rules so that only mail you want is received.

There are also a huge numbr of spam filtering softwares out there, I can't recommend any as NONE are 100% effective.

Now to follow on with your idea of "fighting fire with fire", well to be perfectly honest with you, there's about as much chance of me flying to Pluto then this course of action having any effect what so ever.

Bear in mind, Spammers send out Millions of e-mails a day, so how do you think one person is going to make a difference to this?

This may not be what you want to hear, but that's the cold hard facts.

I totally agree with Ben (foiled by the spread feature). Masking your IP does nothing to stop spam.

If you want to help fight spam, I suggest checking out:

www.cauce.org (http://www.cauce.org)

You can fight spam with various degrees of success depending on how much ownership you want to take in managing your own mail system. The only sure way to NOT receive spam is to deny all email by default and accept email from very specific sources. This is not a very practical approach for most people but some live happily with that policy.

I manage my own mail system and I use various UCE filters, SpamAssassin, RBLs, and RHSBLs, Header Checks, SMTP Client checks, SMTP Recipient/Sender checks, HELO checks, etc. Once in a while I get SPAM (about 2-5 times per month). I don't like it but I can live with that. Because I manage my own mail system (MTA) I have a significant amount of control not typically available to a POP/IMAP/Web email user that can stop SPAM before it even enters my mailbox.

It works for me and the costs I pay is that I have to have my own 24/7 server that I manage that can receive email directly (not by way of a mail relay service). Also, since I have my own MTA, I can create as many email aliases as I'd like (endless). Whenever I have to provide an email address for anything, I create a unique email address for strictly receiving email from whatever it is I needed to provide my email address for. If I receive SPAM to that address then a) I know the culprit, and b) I can easily delete the email alias without much worry.

If you can do that then I would say you'll have a significantly better than average control over SPAM. Otherwise, what Ben/Scott mentioned are your only options.

Casey

A few points here:

1. you will never win the war against a spammer nor will you trace the spam mail back to its true originator. Give up that glimmer of hope.

2. a comment in a discussion group will not be the origin of new spam, the exception being AOL cgat rooms where your screen name can be culled easily. In any other internet discussion group you'd have to actually type in your email address for the bots to harvest it.

3. Simply change email addresses or get a new one for family and friends. It's easy to do with your ISP email account and with creating new webmail accounts. I have Yahoo as my main email address and they do a great job of capturing spam at the mail server level before it reaches your inbox.

I hope this helps.

You can surely trace most attacks using McAfee Security Suite. As
Far as email spam etc McAfee Security Suite will help there too. But
Fooling others about your IP address is not something I found to
Be possible. McAfee Security Suite is sending the mask but I found it
To be very weak.
Regards

You'll trace the spam back to the computer that sent it, most likely not the original spammer but a relay mail server or a host of zombied PCs.

Hi,
You have some good answers.
There are "buy" programs that will hide your IP address; such as:
http://www.sharewareplaza.com/Hide-IP-download_24774.html

There are others, using a search engine to find them.
There is also one that is free, but can't think of the name of it at this time. It re-routes your signals to another server, changing your IP address to a "shared one", then goes to the site you want. Problem is, the server may not always be up and running.
The best practice against Spam email is NOT to use your home computer email address. For example, my dial-up uses an ISP, with 5 email addresses, which I can download email into my Outlook Express.
But, whenever I order online, I always use a Yahoo email address, which then gets all the "bulk" mail, i.e. spam, loaded into it. Just one click clears it all.
I do wish you the best, and good luck.

Just want to reiterate that hiding your IP does absolutely nothing to prevent spam.

I know I should not do this but I will. I personally am curious, are there any programs out there that do hide your ip address, or disguise it?

I know I should not do this but I will. I personally am curious, are there any programs out there that do hide your ip address, or disguise it?

Do a WEB search for IP Anonmizers.

Jesushelper,
Yep, you set your browser up to go through a web proxy. It's free and easily set up though it may slow down your browsing. I'd give you a link but our lovely Websense at work blocks all mentions of proxying. Google "web proxy" and see what you find.